New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd on Sunday slammed the Biden White House for pressuring ABC News to edit out President Joe Biden’s usage of the non-existent word “goodest” during his Friday interview with George Stephanopoulos and for pressuring her to edit her column that highlighted his usage of the word.
Dowd wrote on Sunday that, in her Saturday column, she had quoted Biden saying to Stephanopoulos: “I’ll feel as long as I gave it my all and I did the goodest job as I know I can do, that’s what this is about.”
Dowd said she had done so after she and her researcher listened to the video ten times and checked the ABC News transcript, which showed that he said “goodest.”
She then said that, after the column was posted on Saturday morning, Biden campaign spokesman T.J. Ducklo emailed her to “flag” that ABC News had updated its transcript to change the word “goodest” to “good as,” so that the transcript read, “I’ll feel as long as I gave it my all and I did the good as job as I know I can do, that’s what this is about.”
Dowd said Ducklo asked her if she could “tweak” her column and change the word “goodest” to make it “consistent with the corrected transcript” even though, she wrote, “[T]he revised version was also gobbledygook.”