Most of the time, the panel or roundtable portion of any weekly Sunday political program is a lively exchange among the moderator and the panelists. But that wasn’t the case during one segment of CBS News’ “Face The Nation” this week.

As the show does once a year, it convened a panel made up entirely of the news division’s correspondents, ostensibly to review the big stories of 2021 and make some predictions about where those storylines will go in 2022 and beyond.

SUNDAY: Annual Correspondents Roundtable with CBS News' @NikolenDC, David Martin, @weijia, @edokeefe and @JanCBShttps://t.co/CUggELitVm pic.twitter.com/lkFhwBH1xk

— Face The Nation (@FaceTheNation) December 22, 2021

But at some point in the segment, the panel sat in stunned silence for over a minute-and-a-half, as one of their own spoke the truth about how damaging the lockdowns and other governmental measures have been to our nation’s children. And it’s implicit in her answer that the media is not off the hook for the blatant lack of reporting about it.

Host and moderator Margaret Brennan asked, directing the question first to Jan Crawford, CBS News chief legal correspondent.

Well, I want to get to underreported stories as well. Jan?

And Crawford was the one who spoke up. Watch and listen.

(Her words are worth quoting in full, which I have transcribed below. Curiously, the answers to this question don’t appear in the official transcript provided by CBS News.)

“They will be paying for our generation’s decisions the rest of their lives”: @JanCBS explains why she thinks 2021's biggest underreported story was the devastating impact of COVID policies on children pic.twitter.com/AUU1f6AFNi

— Face The Nation (@FaceTheNation) December 26, 2021

For me…my kids hear me rant about this every day, so I might as well tell you guys.

It’s the crushing impact that our COVID policies have had on young kids and children. By far, the least serious risk for serious illness, but — I mean even teenagers, you know, a healthy teenager has a one in a million chance of getting and dying from COVID, which is way lower than dying in a car wreck on a road trip.

But they have suffered and sacrificed the most, especially kids in underrepresented and at-risk communities. And now we have the surgeon general saying there’s a mental health crisis among our kids.

The risk of suicide attempts among girls now up 51 percent this year. Black kids nearly twice as likely as white kids to die by suicide.

School closures, lockdowns, cancelation of sports. You couldn’t even go on a playground in the D.C. area without cops scurrying, shooing the kids off.

Tremendous negative impact on kids, and it’s been an afterthought. It’s hurt their dreams, their future, learning loss, risk of abuse, their mental health.

And now, with our knowledge, our vaccines, if our policies don’t reflect a more measured and reasonable approach for our children, they will be paying for our generation’s decisions the rest of their lives.

And that, to me, is the greatest underreported story of the past year.

Notice in the video that Brennan was the only one to acknowledge any of what Crawford said, when the reporter mentioned the “mental health crisis among kids,” leading into her sharing that staggering statistic on suicide rates among girls.

RedState has reported on the ways schools have treated children, which verge on child abuse in how they’re implemented. I also previously reported about cities closing skateparks by filling them in with trucks full of sand. And I doubt anyone will soon forget the images of what Crawford described — the playgrounds across the country closed and their gates secured with locks.

Yes, as CBS News’ tweet read, the reporter outlined “the devastating impact of COVID policies on children.” But the unspoken word in that sentence is “Democrat.” It’s been mostly Democrat governors and other officials — elected and unelected — who have imposed the harshest policies during the pandemic, including the ones devastating our young people. It’s not even close.