Former NBC host Chuck Todd admits media feared that covering Biden's decline would help Trump
Ex-NBC anchor Chuck Todd admitted on Wednesday that the media was afraid to cover questions about former President Joe Biden's mental acuity during the 2024 race, believing that doing so would benefit his opponent, then-presidential candidate Donald Trump.
During an appearance on "Piers Morgan Uncensored," the British host asked Todd why the media seemed "reluctant" to push "much harder" on Biden's age at the time, particularly when "everyone was seeing [it] with their own eyes."
Todd defended the media at first, saying that the American public was able to come to its own conclusions about Biden because of the media's coverage, which he said drew attention to Biden's decline without being overt about it.
"Look, we were subtle. 'He's using the back staircase, he's not using the front staircase. Hey, he's not doing any interviews,'" the former "Meet the Press" host said.
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"So there was this reluctance to draw the conclusion to say, ‘Is he not doing this?’ And that I agree with," Todd continued. "That was held back, held back a lot [by the mainstream media]."
He argued that there were a number of individual members of the media who raised concerns about Biden running for re-election, such as Washington Post columnist David Ignatius, who wrote a brutal column urging the president to bow out of the race in September 2023.
"But I understand the argument about the collective on that front," he went on. "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," Todd continued.
"And I think this has been the fundamental mistake that many members of the traditional press have done," Todd continued.
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He listed the media's push to de-platform Trump from social media after the Jan. 6 Capitol riot as one example of media mistakes.
Todd argued Trump's First Amendment rights should have been protected and made the case that the media's reputation suffered because of this.
"It looks more obvious today," Todd said. "Because what did he do? He built his own information ecosystem and now traditional media is doing what? Showing up on YouTube."
"Traditional media doesn't have the influence it did anymore because it [went] along with this deplatforming exercise," he argued.
The admission comes after the release of two bombshell books out this month that reveal Democrats were privately worried about Biden's cognitive decline long before he dropped out of the 2024 presidential race, while publicly denying they had any concerns.
According to Chris Whipple's new book, "Uncharted: How Trump Beat Biden, Harris, and the Odds in the Wildest Campaign in History," Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., told a friend she was startled by Biden's appearance after a White House meeting in May 2024.
"He was not the same Joe Biden," Pelosi reportedly said, and according to the book, "She couldn’t shake the realization that Joe Biden was a shadow of himself."
Yet the next month, Pelosi took to X to bash a Wall Street Journal article as "hit piece" for reporting on multiple claims that mirrored what Pelosi had said, according to Whipple's book.