Forty-five minutes into Wednesday’s edition of the podcast Piers Morgan Uncensored, former NBC News correspondent Meet the Press moderator Chuck Todd made a splash by drawing the curtain back a little on how the mainstream press concealed President Biden’s mental decline because of fear of being seen by their colleagues as helping Trump by hurting Biden (how did that work out?). Todd also noted the foolishness of the media going along with the deplatforming of Donald Trump after January 6 -- which caused the legacy media itself to lose influence.
Piers Morgan: Talk to me about the mainstream media, as Trump puts it, the legacy media, in the four years of the Biden presidency, specifically because look, I’m a Brit, right? And I was living a lot of the time in the U.K, but I was firing off very angry -- I read them the other day -- angry columns about the cognitive state of Joe Biden and his physical and mental ability to be president of the United States, and just wondering why on earth this was being allowed to continue. But why was the mainstream media so reluctant, it seemed to me, to go much, much harder on what everyone was seeing with their own eyes?
Chuck Todd: Look, look, I’ll 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. You know, 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. I would argue it was held back a lot back in the late 80s when it was clear Ronald Reagan wasn’t necessarily running everything in the White House.
Whether you want to call it decorum, whatever you want to call it -- look, there were plenty members of media -- I remember David Ignatius in the Washington Post, plenty of individual people questioning whether he should run. I certainly questioned whether he should run, you didn’t understand, you know, there was some of that. But I understand the argument about the collective on that front.
The only thing I can chalk it up to 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, right? That it was some sort of zero-sum game.
Todd went further in mocking mistakes by his former press colleagues, saying the spirit of the First Amendment also protects Trump and his misguided allies from the January 6 riots, pointing out that Todd himself had interviewed the president of Iran, so why wouldn't he talk to a congressmember who didn't certify the 2020 election?
And I think that has been the fundamental mistake that many members of the traditional press have done. For instance, advocating for deplatforming Donald Trump after January 6. Look, I think January 6 was atrocious, it was awful, all those things. But to deplatform him? We’re Americans, defend the First Amendment. I’m going to defend the First Amendment when Donald Trump tried to kick members out of the press, but you gotta defend his First Amendment right to also talk.
And I think that was also I would argue a mainstream media mistake. It looks more obvious today, because what did he do, he built his own information ecosystem and now traditional media is doing what? Showing up on YouTube, right? Traditional media doesn’t have the influence it did anymore because it shoved -- it got along with this deplatforming exercise, which I think fundamentally was -- I didn’t get it then, I was not one of those who said I wouldn’t put a January sixer, or a de-certifier on the shows. I thought, why would you do that? I’d interviewed the president of Iran, I’ve got no problem interviewing a member of Congress who chose not to certify the election. I never understood that logic when you think about the First Amendment of our constitution.
Hat-tip The Wrap.
