As RedState reported, Sen. John Fetterman is back in the US Senate, and things are not going well. During a hearing on Wednesday, he attempted to grill the former CEO of the now-failed Silicon Valley Bank.

I’ll post the video in a moment, but first, let’s look at how Washington Post reporter Jeff Stein transcribed what was said. This comes via a screenshot because Stein was ratioed so badly that he eventually deleted his original tweet, but we’ll get to that shortly.

Well he deleted the tweet. So here’s the screenshot pic.twitter.com/WTeQo8aIq4

— Andrew Wimsatt 🖐 (@ajwimsatt) May 17, 2023

Now, you might read that quote and think “Well, I guess Fetterman is doing just fine.” You might even think that he’s making a stellar recovery from the massive stroke that he had in 2022 before refusing to drop out of the race despite clearly being incapable of fulfilling the duties of a senator.

But like most things that come from the mainstream media, Stein’s “quote” wasn’t heavily, how do you say, slanted. To be more clear, the “reporter” completely wrote what Fetterman said to hide his condition.

Here is the actual quote of everything Fetterman said along with the video, and consider this a fair warning if you get migraines easily.

JUST IN: John Fetterman struggles to ask a question at a Senate Banking Committee hearing.

This is the most painful 90 seconds you will watch all month.

“That’s like if you have I mean like, eh eh and and they also realize is that that that now they have, it’s in they… pic.twitter.com/lgy7UTNipc

— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) May 16, 2023

Is. Is it staggering? Is it a staggering a res uh responsibility that ju that a head of a bank could literally could literally crash our economy? It’s astonishing. That’s like if you have I mean like uh uh and and they also realizes that that that now they have it’s in-, in- guaranteed, a guaranteed way to be saved again by a no matter, by no mat, by, by how? You know, so it’s, it’s, you know isn’t it appropriate that the uh that those kind of controls should be were stricter? To prevent this kind of thing from willing? Or should we just go on start bailing and sailing whoever bank regardless of how, how raaaare rare theirs their conduct is? Who you know I’ll give you an example. Uh, the republicans want to give a work requirement for SNAP. You know for a uh uh uh uh a hungry family has to have these this kind of penalties or these some kinds of wooooord or working uh require shouldn’t you have some kind of working required suu after we sail your bank uh billions of your bank? Because you seem we were preoccupied uh when uh then SNAP uh requirements for works for uh hungry people but not about pro, protecting the tax, tax papers you know that will bail them out of whatever does about a bank to crash it.

According to Stein, this is what Fetterman said with the vocal pauses removed.

Shouldn’t you have a working requirement after we bail out your bank? Republicans seem to be more preoccupied with SNAP requirements for hungry people than protecting taxpayers who have to bail out these banks.

In reality, this is what Fetterman said. If you look really closely, you can spot the difference.

Shouldn’t you have some kind of working required suu after we sail your bank uh billions of your bank? Because you seem we were preoccupied when then SNAP requirements for works for hungry people but not about pro, protecting the tax, tax papers you know that will bail them out of whatever does about a bank to crash it.

This isn’t just correcting a spelling (which you’d normally bracket when giving a quote). This is making up an entire quote nearly out of whole cloth and trying to pass it off as what a Democrat senator actually said. Notice that in Fetterman’s real quote, he doesn’t even mention Republicans. Stein took an earlier mention of Republicans and transplanted it later in Fetterman’s statement to try to make him sound more coherent.

What kind of journalism is that? Making up quotes to protect a politician? I’d expect that kind of thing from the White House (and they’ve done it), but the Post is supposed to have basic standards. Is Jeff Stein a reporter or a political operative?

Stein did eventually delete his tweet after getting thoroughly roasted, but it shouldn’t have come to that. Reporters should be quoting politicians correctly, and if they are going to clean up a quote, there should be an explicit disclaimer attached as to what was changed and why they did so. Anything less is not journalism. It’s just partisan activism.