NewsNation political contributor Chris Cillizza said on Monday that he believes the corporate media was “too willing” to accept former President Joe Biden’s White House staff’s claims that he was exceptionally fit.
Axios’s Alex Thompson, in a Saturday acceptance speech for an award for his coverage of Biden’s mental decline, criticized journalists, including himself, for not seeing it earlier. Cillizza, on his YouTube channel, praised Thompson for his reporting and his acceptance speech, agreeing with the Axios reporter that journalists fell for the “cover-up” by Biden’s staff rather than participating in it themselves. (RELATED: After Democratic Panic, Harris Lines Up Softball Interview Tour)
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“People say to me all the time, ‘Of course it was a cover-up by the media. Just look at Joe Biden. Of course he was out of it.’ And to that, I would say there is, and there should be, a much higher bar for a media outlet or a reporter to say that Joe Biden is clearly mentally slower or incapacitated than it is for someone to just say he has dementia, he has Parkinson’s,” Cillizza said. “You can say that, but for the media to report that, it’s a very high bar. And I don’t think that bar was met.”
“So, yes, when I watched Joe Biden, the eye test made me think, as I watched him, ‘Man, he has really slowed down and I’m not sure he should run for a second term.’ It did not make me think, ‘Man, he definitely — something is really wrong with him and I’m going to cover it up so that he can win.’ No, absolutely not,” he continued. “But I will also add this: that does not, does not, the fact that I do not believe there was any coordinated cover-up by the media of Joe Biden’s condition, that does not get us media off the hook.”
Cillizza then referenced his December video in which he expressed remorse for not probing concerns regarding Biden’s mental and physical health sooner, acknowledging he was wrong to overlook them during his tenure at CNN.
He also theorized that the reporters’ “unconscious bias” toward Democrats led them to accept White House staff’s assertions about Biden.
“Any study that you ever see about who reporters vote for, they vote for Democrats much more than Republicans. And I think what was going on here is, I think it was an inherent and sort of unconscious bias more than a conscious bias,” Cillizza said. “But I think the reporters covering this White House were too willing to take the Biden team’s word for it. Anytime you asked about Joe Biden, they would say, ‘I mean, he’s 80, he moves a little bit more stiffly than he did before, but man, he is totally with it. He outworks our 20-something staffers.’”
“And I think reporters were too willing to just say, ‘Okay, that makes sense.’ They were too credulous. They didn’t ask enough questions. Their skepticism meter was not honed, turned up high enough. And I think that had it been a Republican in that office, particularly if that Republican had been [President] Donald Trump, there would have been less credulity,” he added. “There would have been less willingness to just go along with what the Trump White House was saying, like, ‘Oh, he’s fine. You don’t see him in his great times. He’s amazing.’ I think there would have been more hard questions asked.”
Former NBC News chief political analyst Chuck Todd also suggested on April 9 that bias was at play with legacy media’s Biden coverage. He said they deliberately softened coverage of Biden’s decline to evade an appearance of boosting Trump.
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