Edited video shared to claim U.S. President Joe Biden was asleep on live TV

What is the claim? 

A video supposedly showing U.S. president Joe Biden asleep on live television has gone viral on X (formerly Twitter). The 18-second video shows a split screen with a news anchor on one side, and Biden with his eyes seemingly closed on the other, with the anchor saying, "Wake up, wake up…(laughs) okay…this is your wake up call… I’ll tell you what…He’s meditating, he’s taking a little nap.” We can hear laughter mingled with the sound of snores in the background. The ticker at the bottom says “On Air: Joe Biden.”

Screenshots of posts from X (Source: X / Modified by Logically Facts)

A user on X shared this video with the caption, “Joe Biden Falls Asleep On Air!” The post (archived here) has around 1.5 million views. Archived versions of similar posts can be seen here and here. 

However, we found that a 2020 video of Joe Biden has been edited into another video in which a presenter tries to wake up a guest on the show who has fallen asleep.

What we found

A reverse image search of frames from the video led us to a longer video (archived here) uploaded on October 18, 2011, to a YouTube channel belonging to KBAK-KBFX-Eyewitness News - BakersfieldNow, a California-based news outlet. 

Screenshot of the original video from KBAK’s YouTube channel. (Source:  KBAK- KBFX-Eyewitness News - BakersfieldNow)

We found that the original video does not feature Joe Biden, but musician Harry Belafontane. The original video, titled "Official Station Video: Is Harry Belafonte asleep during a live TV interview?" shows newscaster Layla Santiago trying to interview Belafonte. Santiago can be heard saying, “Harry wake up,” at the seven-second mark, and the part going viral on social media starts at the 13-second mark. We can hear other news presenters laughing in the background, but there is no sound of anyone snoring. 

A Billboard news report (archived here) from October 2011 corroborates this incident. The Billboard article also has a statement from the musician's publicist, Ken Sunshine, who said, “There was a technical glitch in the feed to a local station in Bakersfield, Calif. His earpiece wasn’t working, so he decided to take the time to mediate before the rest of his Day-O," a reference to Belafonte's most famous song, "Banana Boat (Day-O)."

Comparison of the original video with musician Harry Belafonte and the edited video with Joe Biden’s superimposed video. Source: YouTube/ X)

We found that the footage of Joe Biden in the viral clip was taken from a video (archived here) from April 2020, titled "Hillary Clinton endorses Joe Biden for president" uploaded to The Guardian’s YouTube channel. 

In the video, Hillary Clinton, who had dropped out of the presidential race, was endorsing fellow Democratic Party nominee Joe Biden in the run-up to the 2020 elections. Biden can be seen looking down at various points in the video — at the 0:13 mark, the 0:39 mark, and the 1:16 mark. Portions from this video have been slowed down and used in the now-viral clip.

A keyword search using the title of the video led us to the same clip uploaded to the channels of other media platforms like the Associated Press and NBC. This CBS report stated that the endorsement happened at Clinton’s virtual Town Hall in April 2020.  

The verdict 

Two old videos—one from 2020 and one from 2011— have been stitched together to claim that current U.S. president Joe Biden fell asleep on live television. The two videos are unrelated, and it was musician, Harry Belafontane, not Biden, who was reportedly asleep during an interview. Therefore, we have marked this claim as false.