Former CNN political analyst Chris Cillizza argued on Monday that journalists’ own unconscious biases stopped them from noticing then-President Joe Biden’s decline.
Cillizza released a video titled, “Why it *still* matters that the media missed the big Biden story,” where he reflected on how Axios’ Alex Thompson used his award speech at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner to “call out how both the Biden White House and the media mishandled President Biden’s cognitive decline during the 2024 election.”
Cillizza noted further that Thompson “admitted the media missed key parts of the story, which hurt public trust.”
“Of course it was a cover-up by the media, just look at Joe Biden,” Cillizza said. However, he argued the situation is more complicated than that.
BIDEN’S TEAM HID THE TRUTH ABOUT HIS HEALTH ALL ALONG: WH PRESS SEC
Cillizza said there is a very high bar to directly report that Biden had dementia or some similar condition, which he believes wasn’t met.
“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,” he said. “the media should have asked more questions about Joe Biden I should have asked more questions about Joe Biden and his health. We should have dug harder.”
He addressed the question of why so many reporters failed to do so, and argued that it probably comes down to unconscious biases allowing them to turn a blind eye.
“Any study that you ever see about who reporters vote for, they vote for Democrats much more than Republicans,” Cillizza said. “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. 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, 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.”
BIDEN’S TEAM HID THE TRUTH ABOUT HIS HEALTH ALL ALONG: WH PRESS SEC
Had it been a Republican in office rather than Biden, he suggested, it may have been a very different story.
“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 Donald Trump, there would have been less credulity. 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.’”
He added, “I think there would have been more hard questions asked, and I think there should have been more hard questions asked by the media of Joe Biden and Joe Biden’s staff about his health. I absolutely think that’s true.”
