Speaking in a statement given to the Jeff Bezos-owned Washington Post on Monday, January 6, former NBC News anchor and journalist Brian Williams slammed current journalists for failing to call out President Joe Biden over his cognitive health issues while he was “visibly struggling” with those issues throughout his term.
Williams made those comments to the Washington Post for an article in which ten journalists commented on how the press should work to properly cover the second term of President-elect Donald Trump. Instead of focusing on that, he mainly slammed journos for not doing their duty and covering Biden accurately.
Commenting on the matter, Williams first noted that, as regards covering Trump, it will be annoying to hear the usual cliches from the media about the president and his Cabinet, saying, “Listen to the end-of-the-day reports from correspondents, and you’ll hear a virtual F8 key of cliched old phrases from another time in American life and politics. My personal favorite is ‘stopgap measure,’ a phrase you will only hear on the air and never in the course of your life. A part of me dies when I hear that a Cabinet choice is ‘raising eyebrows,’ (or, worse, ‘raising ire’) because the [intended] nominee is a ‘firebrand.’”
Continuing, he noted that the media’s coverage of such issues is a gross insult to those watching or listening because it is so obviously untrue and in direct contradiction to what they are able to discern for themselves, nane. He said, slamming how the media tried to cover for Biden, “It’s actually insulting, and a gross disservice to those watching and listening — because it doesn’t match what they just saw or heard for themselves.”
Building on that, he further skewered the media’s coverage of Biden, saying, “It was crushing to watch so many working journalists attempt to generate the words to accurately describe a visibly struggling and diminished president, seemingly unable to complete a sentence or a thought in his disastrous and final debate.”
Then, commenting on the disaster that was the Biden presidency itself, saying, “Say it with me: It is perhaps the ultimate irony that the electoral collapse of the Democratic Party in 2024 was triggered in large part by the man who ran to save the country and democracy — the same man who then tried to stay too long at the fair. There, I said it. Now someone please say it into a microphone. You can do it.”
Williams isn’t the only one to say so. Recently, CBS News reporter and chief legal correspondent Jan Crawford spoke about the same issue. When asked what a key, underreported issue was in 2024, Crawford said, “Undercovered and underreported, that would be, to me, Joe Biden’s obvious cognitive decline that became undeniable in the televised debate.” Garrett, clarifying, said, “At the presidential debate with Donald Trump.” Crawford told him, “Unquestioned,” meaning Biden’s brain issues.
She continued, “And it’s starting to emerge now that his advisers kind of managed his limitations, which has been reported in “The Wall Street Journal,” for four years.” She further noted, “And yet he insisted that he could still run for president. We should have much more forcefully questioned whether he was fit for office for another four years, which could have led to a primary for the Democrats.”
Watch her here:
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