THIS IS CNN: Ex-CNN journalist speaks out on Biden cover-up, says White House aides made it difficult on press.
Former CNN journalist Chris Cillizza admitted there is “ample evidence” former President Joe Biden’s aides covered up his cognitive decline by shaming reporters and making it uncomfortable to seek the truth.
Cilizza, who previously served as CNN’s editor-at-large and now has his own Substack, opened up about his experience as the media industry reckons with the notion it failed to cover Biden’s declining health until his frail debate showing last June that led to him exiting the 2024 presidential race.
“I think there is now ample evidence that there was a cover-up on Joe Biden’s actual physical and mental condition by his aides in the White House. There’s been a ton of reporting on it… too much, I think, to dismiss it,” Cillizza told Fox News Digital in an email.
While Cillizza believes Biden aides were hiding the truth from the American people, the former CNN political analyst doesn’t believe the press was part of the cover-up.
“Instead, I think the Biden team made it really hard to ask questions about his health — they shamed you, said you didn’t like him, etc.,” Cillizza said, noting that many reporters, including himself, “let that be that.”
Cillizza doesn’t believe President Donald Trump’s team would receive the same treatment from the mainstream press. He feels that some reporters took the Biden team’s word for it because they were either more “inclined to believe a Democratic president,” or were likely to believe “someone who hadn’t said 30,000 false or misleading things while in office.”
Chris, you do know you were tasked with covering Joe Biden, who prior to his catastrophic mental decline spent decades as the human gaffe machine, right? Former CNN Editor’s Excuse for Failing to Cover Biden’s Mental Decline Is So Pathetic: ‘They Shamed You.’
They accused you of not liking Joe Biden, and you … kicked at the grass, turned around, and slowly walked away? How pathetic.
What an absurdly roundabout way to admit that you, and just about everyone else in your field, are really, really bad at your jobs. If you’re pretending to be a journalist and your subject ‘liking’ you is a factor in how you report, you should find a new line of work.
You’re not a journalist any longer. You’re a sheep.
How can you be so spineless that the people you’re trying to report on shaming you is a deterrent from covering them accurately? Granted, Cillizza comes off as about as tough and intimidating as a piece of toast, but still. Are there no reporters out there with some pride in their work? Willing to take a stand to give the American people the truth?
And no, you don’t get to shift blame onto Biden’s aides and pretend you had no part. Sorry. Yes, they’re responsible for one of the biggest cover-ups in American political history. But it used to be the media’s job to expose scandals like this.
As Byron York writes, “There is an inside story of Biden’s decline and an outside story of Biden’s decline. The inside story is the effort by the White House staff, plus its Democratic allies, plus its supporters in the press, to conceal Biden’s problem. The outside story is the many public appearances — moments of Biden appearing confused, lost, or frozen — during which millions of viewers could see for themselves that the president had a serious problem. Another way to put it would be to say that the inside story was the effort to deny that the outside story existed.”
Collectively, CNN worked very hard to ask viewers, who are you going to believe, us or your lying eyes?