We regret to inform you that the Regime Media has done it again. None of the evening network newscasts covered President Joe Biden’s latest gaffe, wherein he claimed that his uncle was eaten by cannibals after crashing his military aircraft over Papua New Guinea during World War II while trying to attack former President Donald Trump.

Below is the statement in its full context, as aired on MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell Reports on Wednesday, April 17th, 2024 (click "expand" to view transcript):

JOE BIDEN: …and, when D-Day occurred, the next day, on Monday all four of my mother's brothers went down and volunteered to join the military. And four of them -- three of them made it. One was 4F- couldn't go. And, uh… Ambrose Finnegan- we called him Uncle Bosie- he was shot down. He was Army Air Corps. Before there was an Air Force. He flew single-engine planes. Reconnaissance flights over New Guinea.  He volunteered if someone couldn't make it. He got shot down in an area where there were a lot of cannibals. In New Guinea. At the time. They never recovered his body, but the government went back when I went down there and they checked and found parts of the plane and the like. And what I was thinking about when I was standing there was when Trump refused to go up to the memorial for veterans in Paris. And he said they were a bunch of suckers and losers. To me, that is such a disqualifying assertion made by a president. Suckers and losers. Guys who saved civilization in the 1940s. Suckers and losers. And I just wanted to go and- we have a tradition in our family that my grandfather started. When you visit a gravesite of a family member, it’s going to sound strange to you, but- you say three Hail Marys. That's what I was doing at the site. My grand- my uncle, Ambrose Finnegan, Uncle- Uncle Bosie, was a hell of a guy from what I- I never met him, obviously. But I just wanted to see where he was memorialized.

The gaffe in and of itself is Biden Normal at this point, but was notable enough to warrant fact-checks by both Politifact (“highly unlikely”) and Snopes (“False”). Snopes cited the AP’s own verification, which in turn cited the DoD’s POW/MIA Accounting Agency: 

According to the Pentagon’s Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency, Biden’s uncle, known by the family as “Bosie,” died on May 14, 1944, while a passenger on an Army Air Forces plane that, “for unknown reasons,” was forced to ditch in the Pacific Ocean off the northern coast of New Guinea. “Both engines failed at low altitude, and the aircraft’s nose hit the water hard,” the agency states in its listing of Finnegan. “Three men failed to emerge from the sinking wreck and were lost in the crash.”

In the face of such evidence the White House was left with little choice than to pretend Biden didn’t say what he said on national TV.

White House spokesman Andrew Bates did not address the discrepancy between the agency’s records and Biden’s account when he issued a statement on the matter.

“President Biden is proud of his uncle’s service in uniform,“ Bates said, adding Finnegan ”lost his life when the military aircraft he was on crashed in the Pacific after taking off near New Guinea.”

Biden “highlighted his uncle’s story as he made the case for honoring our ‘sacred commitment ... to equip those we send to war and take care of them and their families when they come home,’ and as he reiterated that the last thing American veterans are is ‘suckers’ or ‘losers.’”

None of this, or any mention whatsoever of a widely-debunked statement made by the President of the United States, made it to any of the three network evening newscasts. Even more galling is the realization, when viewing the video in its broader context, that poor old Uncle Bosie was just a narrative bridge on which Biden got to what he really wanted to do, which was to hit Trump on the equally dubious “suckers and losers”. Instead, viewers got an earful on such vital issues of the day as, for example, Caitlin Clark’s salary.  

On the one hand you have media omissions of actual statements made by Joe Biden, and on the other, you have outright fabrications based on partial statements stripped of their context when uttered by Donald Trump, such as the routine “Trump called immigrants animals” whenever Trump addresses MS-13 or other violent criminal aliens such as the killers of Laken Riley, for example. 

The title of “Regime Media” is well-earned here, and we note the media’s descent into terminal institutional corruption over just a few short cycles: going from “what about your gaffes?” to simply, “what gaffes?”