Yes, the Media Covered for Biden
The mainstream media’s failure to swiftly cover former President Joe Biden’s cognitive decline was again a topic of conversation this week, after Axios reporter Alex Thompson gently chided fellow journalists during his remarks at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner.
The 2024 dinner, which I attended, was a muted affair when compared with previous years: The evening’s preplanned entertainment, comedian Amber Ruffin, was canceled in advance, and President Donald Trump declined to participate. Thompson thus attracted most of the headlines; accepting an award for his own reporting, he conceded that the press corp was far too deferential to Biden’s inner circle on the topic of the president’s fitness for office.
“President Biden’s decline and its cover-up by the people around him is a reminder that every White House, regardless of party, is capable of deception,” said Thompson. “We, myself included, missed a lot of this story. And some people trust us less because of it.”
“We bear some responsibility for faith in the media being at such lows. I say this because acknowledging errors builds trust, and being defensive about them further erodes it. We should have done better.”
My thoughts at the WHCA dinner on covering Biden. pic.twitter.com/V16yQkPh5n— Alex Thompson (@AlexThomp) April 27, 2025
Thompson’s frankness garnered polite applause at the dinner. But not everyone has been so willing to admit error. Consider Chuck Todd, former host of NBC’s Meet the Press program, who was unusually strident when tackling this subject on Chris Cillizza’s podcast this week.
.@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
“I refuse to accept this stupid premise because it’s a manufactured right-wing premise to stain the media….There are MSNBC and CNN pundits that absolutely carried water for Joe Biden, but they’re not journalists, they’re former strategists,” said Todd. “This is an attempt by some to virtue signal, it’s pitting different news organizations against each other.”
Distinguishing mainstream media pundits from mainstream media journalists is not as easy as Todd suggests. Cable news is full of programs that mix news and opinion and feature perspectives that straddle this line. For instance, how should we classify MSNB
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