ABC News adjusted its initial transcript of a much-discussed moment during President Biden's Friday interview after White House officials told the network they believed the president's words were misrepresented, according to multiple people familiar with the discussions.
The moment came toward the end of Mr. Biden’s interview, when George Stephanopoulos asked the president how he would feel if he stayed in the presidential race and lost to former President Donald J. Trump.
“I think as long as I did my best and I did the best job that I could, that's the essence of it,” Mr. 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 think as long as I did my best and I did the best job I possibly could, that's the gist of it.” The network attached an editor's note explaining that the transcript had been “updated for clarity.”
At that point during the interview, Mr. Biden's actual words were difficult to understand and were somewhat subject to interpretation.
ABC's standards team decided to review the audio on Saturday after receiving questions from the White House as well as several news organizations asking whether Mr. Biden had said “best” or “good as.”, according to a person familiar with the network's discussions.
After reviewing the transcript, the network decided to adjust it and add an editor's note, the person said. The network did not make any changes to the audio or video of the interview.
After ABC revised the transcript on Saturday, a spokesman for the president's re-election campaign sent emails to several reporters at The New York Times requesting that the word “best” be changed in the newspaper's coverage of the interview, citing the updated transcript.
The Times has revised Mr. Biden’s quotes in its articles about the interview to bring them into line with ABC’s updated transcript.
At a time of high political crisis for Mr. Biden, and widespread discussion about his physical and mental health, nearly every word he utters in public — particularly in an unscripted setting such as the ABC interview — is under a microscope.
After Friday's interview, White House stenographers, who are not political appointees and routinely record all of the president's public remarks, noticed differences between their recording and ABC's transcript, according to a person familiar with the situation.
This led a White House official to raise the issue of the quote's accuracy with ABC representatives on Saturday morning, the source said.
The 22-minute interview, which aired at 8 p.m. on Friday, was watched by 8.5 million viewers, according to early Nielsen data. It was ABC's most-watched prime-time news program since Mr. Stephanopoulos interviewed former FBI Director James Comey in April 2018, excluding election nights and debates.