On Thursday, President Joe Biden’s former chief of staff Jeff Zients sat down in a closed door session before the House Oversight Committee and confirmed what we all knew and saw, Biden wasn’t fully in charge of the White House.

Among the blockbuster revelations:

• Hunter Biden sat in on meetings about who would be pardoned.
• The former chief of staff wasn’t in the final meeting about the “most controversial pardons” of his term – which included several members of the Biden family – that were issued on the final day in office.
• Zients confirmed he didn’t send the email that authorized use of Biden’s autopen. An aide with access to that email sent authorization on his behalf for some of the pardons.
• Zients called for a full cognitive test after Biden’s disastrous debate performance.
• Biden began having “difficulty remembering dates and names,” while “decisions that once required three meetings eventually began to require a fourth.” 
• First Lady Jill Biden urged Zients to adjust the former President’s schedule to get more rest and return to the residence early in the evening. 
•  Former Biden Deputy Chief of Staff Annie Tomasini asked Zients to decrease Biden’s schedule and shorten the distances he would have to walk and the number of stairs to climb.

Also on Thursday, President Donald Trump claimed Biden’s autopen was “illegally used, he [Biden] never gave orders.” The President has called the autopen scandal “one of the biggest, ever!”  

However, this scandal remains too hot to touch for the broadcast networks. 

NBC was the only network to cover the Zients testimony in a 1 minute, 48 second report by correspondent Ryan Nobles, on the September 19 NBC Nightly News. 

However, in that report, Nobles never talked about Hunter Biden, the autopen authorization, the need for a cognitive test, or the steps limit. Nobles only reported about Biden forgetting dates, names, and Jill Biden’s rest requirements. It should be noted that the last 30 seconds of Nobles’ report dealt with Kamala Harris’s book and her squabbling with Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro.

Overall, the broadcast networks (on their evening, morning, and Sunday roundtable news shows) have spent only 5 minutes, 50 seconds total in four months (June 18 through to September 19), since the hearings began.

Those 5 minutes, 50 seconds all arrived on NBC and PBS. ABC and CBS have done NOTHING on the Biden mental decline hearings. NBC aired 5 minutes, 17 seconds on the hearings, PBS spent just a scant 33 seconds on them. 

However, only one testimony (Zients) was mentioned, and it was only on NBC. Nothing on ABC, CBS, or PBS. 

The broadcast networks covered up Biden’s decline when the world saw it happen in real time, so it’s not shocking that they’re still covering up the investigation into one of the biggest presidential scandals in recent history.

For this study MRC analysts looked at the broadcast evening (ABC World News Tonight, CBS Evening News, NBC Nightly News), morning news shows (ABC’s Good Morning America, CBS Mornings, CBS Saturday Morning, CBS Sunday Morning, NBC Today, NBC Sunday Today), Sunday roundtable shows (ABC’s This Week, NBC’s Meet the Press, CBS’s Face the Nation), and PBS’s NewsHour from June 18 through September 19.