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ABC News has edited the original transcript of a much-discussed moment during its interview with President Biden on Friday after White House officials told the network they believed the president's words had been misrepresented, according to several people familiar with the conversation.
The moment came at the end of Biden's interview, when George Stephanopoulos asked the president how he would feel if he stayed in the race and was defeated by former President Donald J. Trump.
“I will feel that as long as I gave it my all and did the best job I can, that this is what matters,” Biden said, according to the official transcript distributed by ABC on Friday night.
By Saturday afternoon, the quote in the network's online transcript had changed slightly: “I'm going to feel like as long as I did the best job I could and did the best job I could, that's what it's all about.” The network added an editorial note explaining that the transcript “has been updated for clarity.”
The words Biden spoke at that point in the interview were difficult to understand and open to some interpretation.
ABC's standards team decided to review the audio after receiving questions from the White House and several news organizations on Saturday asking whether Biden had said “goodest” or “good as,” according to a person with knowledge of the network's discussions.
After conducting the review, the network decided to edit the transcript and add the editorial note, the person said. The network did not alter the audio or video of the interview itself.
After the ABC transcript was edited on Saturday, a spokesman for the president's re-election campaign emailed several New York Times reporters asking them to change the word “best” in the newspaper's reporting on the interview, citing the updated transcript.
The Times has updated Biden's quote in its articles about the interview to align with the updated ABC transcript.
At a time of great political peril for Mr. Biden, with much debate about his physical and mental health, nearly every word he utters in public — particularly in an unscripted setting like the ABC interview — is under scrutiny.
After Friday's interview, White House stenographers, who are not political appointees and regularly record all of the president's public speeches, noticed a discrepancy between their recordings and ABC's transcript, a source familiar with the matter said.
That prompted a White House official to raise the issue of the quote's accuracy with ABC representatives Saturday morning, the source said.
The 22-minute interview, which aired at 8 p.m. Friday, was watched by 8.5 million viewers, according to early Nielsen data. It was ABC’s most-watched prime-time news program, excluding election nights and debates, since Mr. Stephanopoulos interviewed former FBI Director James Comey in April 2018.
