By Jason Cohen, Daily Caller News Foundation | April 09, 2025
Former NBC News chief political analyst Chuck Todd said Wednesday that legacy media was “subtle” with its coverage of former President Joe Biden’s age-related issues to avoid the perception of boosting President Donald Trump.
Corporate media spent years downplaying voters’ and Republicans’ concerns regarding Biden’s mental acuity until his disastrous June 2024 debate against Trump. Todd, on “Piers Morgan Uncensored,” said that legacy media members made an error by not focusing on Biden’s problems
“I sit here, and I’ll defend a little bit of this in that I would argue the reason people were able to come to their own conclusion on Joe Biden is because of the media coverage,” Todd said. “Look, we were subtle. ‘He’s using the back staircase. He’s not using the front staircase.’ ‘Hey, he’s not doing any interviews.’ So there was this reluctance to draw the conclusion, to say, ‘Is he not doing this?’ And that I agree with. That was held back — held back a lot.”
Todd also said that the media acted similarly toward the end of former President Ronald Reagan’s second term under comparable circumstances, perhaps out of a sense of “decorum.”
“Look, there were plenty of members in [the] media — I remember David Ignatius in The Washington Post, plenty of individual people questioned whether he should run,” Todd added. “I certainly questioned whether he should run. You didn’t understand, you know, there were some of that. But I understand the argument about the collective on that front.”
“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 said. “Right? That it was some sort of zero-sum game. And I think this has been the fundamental mistake that many members of the traditional press have done.”
Voters were concerned about Biden’s mental fitness being insufficient to be president for years before the June 2024 debate. Republicans repeatedly raised doubts about his cognitive abilities, even during the 2020 campaign as he made numerous gaffes. Yet legacy media outlets consistently dismissed the legitimacy of the concerns and criticized those who voiced them.
For instance, former CNN political analyst Chris Cillizza published an analysis for the outlet in August 2021, criticizing Republicans for proliferating a narrative that Biden was in a state of decline.
“This is the sort of gross, lowest-common-denominator politics that drive people away from public life,” Cillizza wrote. “If Republicans have some sort of proof that Biden is declining, they should bring it forward. If they don’t, they should stop doing what they’re doing. Immediately.”
Cillizza subsequently expressed remorse in December 2024 for not investigating concerns over Biden’s health sooner.
Todd announced in January that he was departing NBC News after nearly 20 years.
Jason Cohen is a reporter at the Daily Caller News Foundation
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