Speaking on his YouTube channel, Chris Cillizza, a former CNN political analyst, bemoaned the American right’s reaction to his apology for not more quickly or forcefully scrutinizing the mental and physical health of President Joe Biden. Cillizza’s comments on the matter come in the wake of reports in mainstream outlets.
The matter began with reports in outlets like the New York Times and Wall Street Journal that Biden’s mental capacity was a concern from within his administration. For example, the report in the New York Times revealed: “[Biden] looks a little older and a little slower with each passing day . . . But it is hard to imagine that he seriously thought he could do the world’s most stressful job for another four years.”
In response to those damning reports, Cillizza released a video on his YouTube channel on Thursday, December 19, confessing during the video that he had been wrong to disregard worries about President Biden’s cognitive capacity to do the job and run his administration during his tenure at CNN until late 2022.
That, predictably, led to crowing about how CNN and others hadn’t done their job as journalists and dug into reports of Biden’s failings. That, in turn, angered Cillizza, who released another vide on Friday, December 20, in which he defended himself and claimed that his motivation in apologizing was honesty and transparency with his audience.
Cillizza said, beginning his freakout about the response to his video and noting his motivations, while ignoring why people might be bad about a CNN political analyst ignoring for years the cognitive health of the sitting US president, “What’s so frustrating to me, just about the Biden thing: I’m just trying to be as honest as I can and as transparent as I can …”
Continuing, he claimed that he did as questions after he left CNN, ignoring that he hadn’t covered it at CNN, where his questions would have mattered much more. He said, “We, I and we in the media did ask questions. I was, particularly on here and on my Substack after I left CNN in 2022, pretty skeptical that Joe Biden was up to the job, but I should have done more.”
Returning to being angry about the furious conservative response to his Thursday video, Cillizza said, on the Friday live stream, “And it’s amazing to me that the reaction among the right is like, ‘You’re lying, you’re just doing this to cover your ass.’ Like, how? What? What? How? I don’t even understand how that would work.”
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He added, “I just try to be as honest as I can with you all … But you can’t really control how people react to it. I felt like, having read that Wall Street Journal story, having read the [New York] Times story and having spent a lot of time thinking about it and reading all the reporting after the June 27th debate, I wish I had pushed harder.”
And, once again insisting that he was simply “trying to be honest,” Cillizza then insisted that he had asked questions, saying, “I think I did push. I think we in the media did push, but I wish I had pushed harder. The hard thing is, you know, you do that and then people question your motives. It’s like no, man, I’m just trying to be honest.”
Watch him here:
Featured image credit: screengrab from the embedded video