Former MSNBC star flails arms furiously as he attacks former colleagues over Biden coverage
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Former MSNBC star Chuck Todd raged over the media's coverage of former President Joe Biden's mental decline and called out his former colleagues - who he claimed are 'not journalists.'
The former host of Meet the Press, who quietly left NBC News earlier this year, refuted the notion that the media failed to adequately cover Biden's decline ahead of the 2024 election and instead blamed the Democratic Party.
'This is not a media failure,' he told political commentator and former CNN staffer Chris Cillizza on his Substack. 'This is a failure of the Democratic Party.'
He went on to call the idea that the media missed the story 'stupid,' claiming it to be a 'right wing manufactured, right wing premise in order to stain the media.'
The longtime NBC and MSNBC host also took the opportunity to dig at his former colleagues.
'The media's got plenty of things to attack them for, and there are MSNBC and CNN and pundits that absolutely carried water for Joe Biden - but they're not journalists,' he said.
'They're former strategists that carried water for Joe Biden.'
Todd bolstered his stance that it was not the media as a whole dodging Biden's decline, citing Washington Post columnist David Ignatius's 'very high-profile' column in 2023 querying if Biden's second-term campaign was 'a good idea.'
'This isn't [weapons of mass destruction] where the White House worked with the mainstream media to manufacture a story that did not exist - that was a press failure. Massive press failure. This was not that failure. This is an attempt by some to virtue signal,' he said.
'And it's a horrible sort of pitting different news organizations against each other, when ultimately the people at fault are Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi, Jill Biden, Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, every elected member of Congress.'
Todd previously spoke out about media coverage steering clear of Biden's cognitive decline to avoid fueling Donald Trump's victory.
Months after leaving the network, Todd told British host Piers Morgan that the reluctance came from a place of fear.
He admitted that networks made a 'fundamental' mistake, and said the fear was being 'perceived as helping Trump is they somehow diminished Biden.'
Todd shared with Morgan his frustration with modern media outlets as he left NBC in January after more than ten years, calling it a 'ripe moment to do so.'
'There's never a perfect time to leave a place that's been a professional home for so long, but I'm pretty excited about a few new projects,' he wrote in a memo to fellow staffers at the time.
'So, I'm grateful for that chance to get a jump start on my next chapter during this important moment.
'The media has a lot of work to do to win back the trust of viewers/listeners/readers, and I'm convinced the best place to start is from the bottom up,' he added.
'The only way to fix this information ecosystem is to stop whining about the various ways the social media companies are manipulating things and instead roll up our collective sleeves and start with local.'
Todd said he'd 'continue to share [his] reporting and unique perspective of covering politics with data and history', so the American public may better understand 'where we are and where we’re going.'
'We’re grateful for Chuck’s many contributions to our political coverage during his nearly two-decade career at NBC News and for his deep commitment to Meet the Press and its enduring legacy,' a statement from NBC added at the time.
'We wish him all the best in his next endeavors.'
