Brian Williams Blasts Broadcast Journalists for Failing to Call Out ‘Visibly Struggling and Diminished’ Biden

Late Night with Seth Meyers

Former NBC anchor Brian Williams ripped into the media for their coverage of a “visibly struggling and diminished” President Joe Biden on Wednesday.

Williams was one of 10 journalists to provide The Washington Post with statements on where they think they media coverage of President-elect Donald Trump will land in his second term.

In Williams’s statement, the longtime journalist accused media outlets of being lazy in what language they choose to deploy and warned people to be ready to “be transported back to about 1978.”

“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,” Williams wrote. “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.'”

He called such media language “lazy, numbing and normalizing in a time of urgency and exigency,” and added that it often doesn’t match what people are actually seeing.

Then he turned his attention to Biden and the media’s coverage of the incumbent president.

“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,” Williams wrote. “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.”

Williams accused those in the media of still not being able to admit their failure in covering Biden’s struggles.

“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,” he wrote. “There, I said it. Now someone please say it into a microphone. You can do it.”