Chuck Todd denies US media failed to uncover Biden's mental demise: ‘Right-wing manufactured'
Former NBC host Chuck Todd denied that the mainstream media missed the story of Joe Biden's mental demise — calling it 'right-wing manufactured' spin.
'I just refuse to accept this stupid premise because it's a ring-wing manufactured, right-wing premise in order to sustain the media,' Todd, who hosted 'Meet the Press' for about 10 years, told former CNN pundit Chris Cillizza on his Substack channel on Monday.
Todd insisted it was not the media's fault for overlooking Biden's demise, but that the blame should be placed on the Democrats in office who covered up the story.
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3 Former NBC host Chuck Todd slammed the idea that the media failed to report Joe Biden's mental decline.
X / @ChrisCillizza
'This isn't WMDs [Weapons of Mass Destruction], where the White House worked with the mainstream media to manufacture a story that did not exist. That was a press failure, massive press failure,' Todd said, referring to the media's slanted coverage of President George W. Bush's 'War on Terror.'
'This is an attempt by some to virtue signal, and it's this horrible sort of pitting different news organizations against each other when ultimately the people at fault are Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi, Jill Biden, Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, every elected member of Congress,' he insisted.
More and more journalists have been stepping forward to decry the lack of coverage on the former president's mental decline before the disastrous debate last summer that dashed any hopes of his re-election.
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Cillizza last year even issued an apology for not pushing harder on the story about Biden's mental and physical fitness.
According to Cillizza, Republicans would 'regularly ping me' during his tenure at CNN to ask why he didn't address Biden's decline, but he would 'brush them off' because he had not seen 'evidence' that Biden was faltering — despite numerous verbal gaffes and physical stumbles.
At the White House Correspondents' Dinner on Saturday, Axios' national political correspondent, Alex Thompson, called out the press for not challenging the White House's narrative that Biden was fit for a second term.
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3 Several journalists have come forward to acknowledge a failure of the mainstream media to uncover Joe Biden's mental demise.
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'President Biden's decline and its coverup by the people around him is a reminder that every White House, regardless of party, is capable of deception,' Thompson said.
'But being truth tellers also means telling the truth about ourselves. We, myself included, missed a lot of this story.'
Thompson, like several other journalists, has a book coming out soon on Biden's decline and the White House's 'cover-up.'
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3 President Biden took a small fall while jogging up the stairs of Air Force One in 2021.
Reuters
But Todd claimed the narrative that the media failed to cover Biden's mental fitness is a brouhaha.
'The media's got plenty of things to attack them for, and there are MSNBC and CNN and pundits that absolutely carried water for Joe Biden, but they're not journalists. They're former strategists that carried water for Joe Biden,' Todd said.
He referenced David Ignatius, a Washington Post columnist who wrote a high-profile column in September 2023 arguing that Biden should not run again, and added that 'people like me were promoting Dean Phillips' campaign.'
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