There’s a time-honored journalistic maxim: “If your mother says she loves you, check it out.” It’s meant to instill the value of skepticism, the very lifeblood of real reporting. But the deeper you look into today’s political journalism, the more that ethos looks like a relic — a dusty artifact from a newsroom that no longer exists. Chuck Todd’s recent lament that the media was “deceived” about Joe Biden’s viability is not an act of accountability. It’s an inadvertent confession.
Todd’s point — that the press simply didn’t know what was really going on with Biden — might sound self-reflective on the surface. But beneath it lies a much darker truth: today’s corporate press doesn’t dig, doesn’t question, and certainly doesn’t verify. It recycles. It parrots. And above all, it protects. Not the public — but the insiders.
In a functioning media ecosystem, sources are tools. They’re pieces of a puzzle — each with an agenda, each offering a fragment of the truth. It’s the reporter’s job to fit those pieces together into something coherent and honest. But that requires skepticism. It requires asking the second question. It requires talking to someone who isn’t invited to the same cocktail party.
NEW: Chuck Todd blames “sources” for reporters’ failure to cover Biden’s decline
“The real culprits are the people who are supposed to be our sources on all these things, who were constantly reassuring us behind the scenes, ‘No, no, no, no, it’s better than you think.'”… pic.twitter.com/arnRaEwDOQ
— Jason Cohen (@JasonJournoDC) May 11, 2025
That’s not what Chuck Todd or his peers do. As he unwittingly admitted, the Beltway press corps operates more like stenographers for the ruling class. “Experts say” has come to mean “our friends say.” And when those “friends” lie — whether it’s a leaker from the FBI, a nameless White House aide, or a DNC operative spinning a narrative — the press doesn’t expose them. It shields them. It protects the relationship at all costs.
Think about how insane that is. If a public official or political actor lies to a journalist and that lie is passed off to the public as truth, that’s not just a bad tip — that’s news. That’s the story. And yet, how often do we see “sources who previously misled this reporter” at the top of the next breaking scoop? Never.
Worse still, when a falsehood benefits the establishment — especially the Democratic establishment — it’s rarely corrected. Dissenting voices aren’t just ignored, they’re labeled. “Debunked,” “conspiracy theorist,” “far-right.” Not because the counterargument is wrong, but because it’s inconvenient.
And in the rare instance when reality finally does catch up — say, with Biden’s cognitive collapse or the collapse of a favored narrative — the press doesn’t own it. They frame it as a shared delusion, a mass oversight. “No one saw it coming,” they’ll say. But the truth is plenty of people did. They just weren’t their people.
So let’s take Todd at face value. Let’s say he really didn’t know Biden was politically dead weight. That he really was deceived. Then the obvious follow-up is: will you stop talking to the people who lied to you?
Of course not. Because proximity to power is the only currency that matters in legacy media. And that’s the real scandal. Not that the media got it wrong — but that it always gets it wrong in the same direction. Always in favor of the insiders. Always against the skeptics. Always toward the narrative, and never toward the truth.
