A topic of conversation that has come up in Media World more often than not in the aftermath of President Donald Trump's reelection in November 2024 has been the extent of their role in the cover-up of then-President Joe Biden's decline.

As RedState readers may recall, in the aftermath of the infamous June 2024 presidential debate, Chuck Todd - who was NBC News' chief political analyst at the time - more or less publicly acknowledged that Republicans had been right about Biden's health all along.

"At the end of the day, Joe Biden looks like the caricature that conservative media has been painting. And there were no clips tonight, right, this was - you saw it before your eyes," a visibly stunned Todd proclaimed immediately after the debate.

SEE ALSO: Chuck Todd Goes for Broke As Writing on the Wall for Democrats Becomes More Ominous

Except that a "caricature" is an exaggeration, and there was no exaggerating the fact that questions had been raised about Biden's mental acuity as early as the 2019-2020 Democrat presidential primary - by other Democrats and media figures. There was also no exaggerating the fact that Biden had no business running for a second term.

Since Trump's inauguration, discussion over what the media knew and when has intensified, with at least three books related to this topic either already out or coming out later this year - written by other journalists. 

For his part, Todd made an incredibly damning admission in early April about how there was a real fear in the MSM during the Biden years, telling talk show host Piers Morgan that "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."

Fast forward three weeks, and it appears Todd is singing a completely different tune, telling ex-CNN editor at large Chris Cillizza on Monday in a wild rant in the context of Axios reporter Alex Thompson's WHCA dinner speech that touched on the issue that the cover-up of Biden's decline was not the media's fault but Democrats' fault:

This is not a media failure. This was a failure of the Democratic Party. And the virtue signaling that some people have done to try to say that the media missed this story. They didn’t miss this story. I just refuse to accept this stupid premise! Because it’s a right-wing manufactured right-wing premise in order to stain the media.

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!

The journalist David Ignatius wrote a very high-profile column in October of '23 saying, "Is he really running again, this doesn't seem like a good idea."

People like me were promoting Dean Phillips’ campaign because he was running a campaign that made a lot of sense.

[...] This is an attempt by some to virtue signal. And it’s the 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!

Watch:

.@chucktodd went OFF on the "virtue signaling" of reporters who play into the Trump narrative of a cover-up of Biden's health by the media pic.twitter.com/VUCYsz4K1r

— Chris Cillizza (@ChrisCillizza) April 28, 2025

So, three weeks ago, Todd was admitting the media's reluctance to cover Biden's decline because they were worried it would help Trump, and yet now he's saying it wasn't the media's fault that there wasn't more coverage of it? How does that even make sense? This is Ministry of Truth-level stuff, here.

Further, in trying to differentiate between "journalists" who report news stories and "strategists/pundits" who provide commentary on them, Todd widely misses the mark. The example he gave of a "journalist" who did write about Biden's decline was the Washington Post's David Ignatius. What he left out, however, is that Ignatius is a columnist. Yes, he was once a straight-news reporter, but when a supposedly unbiased reporter transitions to a columnist role, it's because they want to take positions on the issues that, as a news reporter, you're not supposed to (though they often do).

Also, even if Ignatius was a straight-news reporter at the time he wrote that piece, so what? We were three years into Biden's term at that point, well after it had become obvious that he shouldn't have run in 2020, let alone again four years later.

Note something else, too, from Todd's rant: That he openly confessed to promoting Dean Phillips' presidential campaign while he (Todd) was still billing himself as an unbiased reporter. He probably doesn't realize he let that slip out, but yeah, nice going there, Chuck, in confirming our suspicions.

Lastly, what's most telling about Todd's rant is what he left out: The role he played in the cover-up. Let's flash back to about two weeks after the June 2024 debate and how Todd blurted out that a senior cabinet secretary from two years ago had a conversation with him about Biden's decline:

“I’m not gonna out the cabinet secretary. But I had a cabinet secretary two years ago, okay- two years ago, out of the blue 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.’ This is a pretty senior cabinet secretary. So, 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.”

"It’s the story everybody knows and everybody was afraid to talk about"? That rather says it all, I think - not about Democrats, from whom you would expect a cover-up like this, but about the media on the whole, from whom we've learned to expect cover-ups of Democrats but who we ideally should be able to rely on for objective news coverage.

No, the "right-wing" didn't "stain the media" here, Chuck. Y'all did it all to yourselves. Now it's time for y'all to own it.

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