In keeping with the theme of my previous column, we turn to belated admissions from the mainstream media on what they knew about President Joe Biden’s health as he served his sole term in office.
Most notable among them so far is former NBC News “Meet the Press” anchor Chuck Todd, who resigned from the network in January after 18 years.
Last week, Todd appeared on Piers Morgan’s show “Uncensored” and was asked why the press was so hesitant to give Biden’s decline the honest and upfront coverage it deserved.
Todd first attempted to defend the media by laughably claiming many voters ultimately came to conclusions about Biden’s decline because of how journalists reported on it at the time.
“I’ll defend a little bit of this in that I would argue the reason people were able to come to their own conclusion on Joe Biden is because of the media coverage. You know, look, we were subtle,” Todd suggested.
Calling coverage of Biden’s cognitive health and the legitimate questions surrounding it “subtle” was quite the understatement, but it was what came next that gave away the game.
“So there was this reluctance to draw the conclusion, to say, ‘Is he not doing this?’ And that I agree with,” Todd confessed. “That was held back, held back a lot.”
As to the question of “why?” Todd conceded there was a fear that covering the president of the United States honestly and forthrightly, which is their job, might have helped Donald Trump.
“The only thing I can chalk it up to is this, whatever you want to call it, this fear that some members of the media had sometimes that they would be perceived as helping Trump if they somehow diminished Biden. Right?” Todd said.
“And I think this has been the fundamental mistake that many members of the traditional press have done,” Todd went on to note.
What Todd left out was the role he played in the cover-up.
Two weeks after the infamous June 2024 Biden-Trump debate, Todd revealed that a senior Biden cabinet secretary told him in 2022 that he didn’t think Biden would be able to run again and that they had little to no interaction.
“(They) asked me, ‘You really think he’s gonna, he can’t run again like this?’ And I said, ‘Well, you have more interaction with him than I do,’ and they said, ‘I don’t have a lot of interaction with him,’” Todd recalled.
“This is a pretty senior cabinet secretary. And this was two years ago. This is one of those, you know, it’s the classic open secret, nonversation, right? It’s the story everybody knows and everybody was afraid to talk about.”
That in and of itself was a pretty damning admission from Todd.
But he’s far from the only one. Of note, there are three books (so far) that are either out or will be coming out this year that go into great detail about the Biden years, who knew what and when, and the lengths that were taken to keep the public from learning about what was really going on.
Who wrote the books? Journalists who covered Biden for the entirety of his presidency, some of whom clearly kept what they knew to themselves until circumstances forced their hand and they could make a buck off it.
They knew. They’ve always known. And the reason they kept quiet is that they had picked a political side and intently worked to protect it at the expense of the truth and what little bit (if any) integrity they had left at that point.
Anyone still trying to figure out why trust in the MSM is at all-time lows needs only look to this issue to finally understand why.
North Carolina native Stacey Matthews has also written under the pseudonym Sister Toldjah and is a media analyst and regular contributor to RedState and Legal Insurrection.
