Steve Doocy Appears to Misquote President Obama in Mitt Romney Interview

By Alex Weprin 

Fox News host Steve Doocy appeared to misquote President Obama in an interview with Mitt Romney. Talking Points Memo caught the mistake, which changed President Obama’s statement about his upbringing into a pretty clear attack on Romney. In the speech Obama said “I Wasn’t born with a silver spoon in my mouth.”

The “silver spoon” comment in the context of the speech seemed to be a swipe against Romney, whose father George Romney was the top executive of a major car company and a former governor of Michigan. But the President was able to maintain plausible deniability until Steve Doocy of Fox News came along. While interviewing Romney on live TV Thursday, Doocy quoted Obama as saying, “Unlike some people, I wasn’t born with a silver spoon in my mouth.”

Update: A Fox News spokesperson tells TVNewser that Doocy will clarify the remark tomorrow morning. That is more than NBC News could say after its misleading George Zimmerman edit came to light.

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While it seems like a slight against Romney, CBS News’ John Dickerson writes that Obama has used that term so much since 2008 that it is “cliche.”

Johnny $, who writes a cable news blog focusing on Fox News, says that Doocy was using a “conversational paraphrase,” but it is pretty clear that Doocy looked down at a piece of paper as he was reading it, indicating that someone had written down the line, and that it was not conversational. The quote would have a hard time passing muster as a paraphrase either, given that it changed the context of the original line so greatly.

Update: Johnny $ elaborated in a comment here, it is well worth reading.

The Washington Post‘s Erik Wemple has been rounding up links on the matter.

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