Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson’s book on the Biden administration, Original Sin, is out this week, and with it, media falling all over themselves to excuse away their culpability in minimizing what 80% of the country, reflected in polling, saw in Joe Biden – He was too old and infirm to serve another four years as president.
From the basement campaign Biden ran in 2020, Ed Morrissey and I would comment weekly that the former President had lost at least a step, or if you’re a baseball fan, 10 miles an hour off his fastball, just from four years earlier when he was Barack Obama’s Vice-President. This is despite all the policy differences with which we always criticized, or the fact that Joe Biden, as Ed often put it, was rhetorically 20 pounds of bull excrement in a 10-pound bag when it came to self-aggrandizement. The point is we knew he was slipping then. It didn’t matter. COVID, the lockdowns, the chaos of the economic collapse and job losses were too much for Donald Trump to overcome, and voters very narrowly chose Biden in the hopes he would return the country to normalcy. Only 42,000 between three states determined the outcome of the election, and you have to wonder how much media coverage, or non-coverage as the case may be, had an impact.
Beltway media had a hand on the scale from the time Donald Trump won the presidency in 2016. Tapper’s proposition in Original Sin is that the White House and elected Democrats lied to him. For the moment, let’s give him his premise.
From the time the transition period began with then-President-Elect Trump, the narrative of Russiagate began to take shape like a hurricane forming in the Atlantic. It gathered strength, because the Democrats lied to media, and media bought the lie, hook, line, and sinker. Here’s Tapper talking about it as if the Russia dossier and story was verifiably true.
BREAKING NEWS: This morning, JD Vance accused Fake Tapper of promoting falsehoods regarding Russiagate.
Tapper refuted the accusation, claiming he never propagated any untruths.
In response, here is a 3.5-minute compilation of Jake Tapper discussing the Russiagate conspiracy… pic.twitter.com/c0s4hHPpV0
— Todd Storm (@Todd_Storm) October 27, 2024
For the next 34 months, media hung onto the narrative as true, because they had no journalistic curiosity to challenge what Democrats were telling them. It wasn’t until both the Mueller report in 2019, and then the Durham report in 2023, before the debunking was finally recognized by media, and then the story just faded away without admitting they were lied to and why.
Late in the 2020 election cycle, a story surfaced in the New York Post about a laptop that was turned into a Delaware shop for repairs, only to discover that the laptop’s owner, Hunter Biden, son of the President, was a drug addict, engaged in a grifting operation off his father’s name that screamed corruption, with 10% for the big guy, and recorded his [personal sexual proclivities that were debased enough to make Caligula and Jeffrey Epstein blush.
The same media would not report on the laptop story as true. Quite the opposite. The Democrats said the story was a hoax, and the media reported it as such. In Tapper’s case, he refused to go there, because the details were too sordid, regardless of whether they were true or not or what the implications of the corruption involved might be.
🚨FLASHBACK🚨
On Oct. 22, 2020, CNN’s Jake Tapper declared that the growing allegations made against Hunter Biden following the NY Post’s reporting on Hunter’s laptop were “too disgusting” to repeat on-air and “wildly unhinged.” pic.twitter.com/djhFlDK8kz
— Francis Brennan (@FrancisBrennan) June 24, 2024
Of course, over time, it was proven that the laptop was indeed the property of Hunter Biden, as were the incriminating contents within. Joe Biden ultimately gave him a full pardon in order to keep him from being prosecuted for multiple criminal acts, even after promising multiple times he wouldn’t, and having that promise repeated from the White House Press Secretary. Media was lied to by the White House and elected Democrats. But again, because of the partisan makeup of the Beltway media bubble, there was no intellectual or professional curiosity to get to the truth and find out the reasons why they were told lies.
Going back to the premise of the Tapper/Thompson book, a political reporter in the nation’s capital using the defense that they were lied to about Biden’s decline is a pretty thin and telling defense. Remember Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s asylum defense? It was rejected by the immigration district court and the subsequent appellate court, but his defense for not being deported back to El Salvador was that if returned, he’d be killed by a rival gang. A reporter, especially in this town, claiming he or she are innocent of wrongdoing because they were lied to, is giving their political predisposition away. Being lied to sure didn’t seem to stop them from doggedly pursuing Republicans when they were in power.
Mark Halperin is one of the few D.C.-based journos out there who are beginning to admit that the media has a real black eye in the ‘credibility with the American people’ department. He saw Biden decline as far back as 2017.
“I don’t understand how there could be a coverup of something that was on television on a nearly nightly basis.”–@MarkHalperin on @AlexThomp and @jaketapper‘s book describing the “White House coverup” of Joe Biden’s decline
Halperin saw Biden’s decline back in 2017.
See here: pic.twitter.com/SexIXtptiL
— Ben Meltzer⏳ (@meltzer_ben) May 14, 2025
That’s great, but not nearly enough. Media in the Beltway adopted the attitude to not believe a word Donald Trump or his administration said during his first term, and have amplified that skepticism in the second term. How many non-scandals have been breathlessly reported on by media about Trump only to have the details come out shortly after shooting the story down? Dozens, the most recent including the supposed scandal of the Qatar 747 being a gift to Trump personally, when in reality, it was a gift to the U.S. Government’s Department of Defense, something that Buzz Patterson has been trying to explain is nothing out of the ordinary.
I’m going to try one last time.
The Qatar B-747 was built in the US by Boeing. They are offering a newer 747 to replace one of the two current AF-1s that have been flying for 40 years. Which are tired and need to be replaced. The wing based at Andrews has also purchased…
— Buzz Patterson (@BuzzPatterson) May 12, 2025
Also included is the gotcha coverage of the Trump administration is all the Maryland Man nonsense around the aforementioned Kilmar Abrego Garcia. Instead of being an innocent dad just trying to get by, it turns out he is a part of MS-13, engaged in human smuggling, and was picked up with two other members of MS-13 that had drugs on them. No matter, though. Media is willing to believe anything bad about the White House, and assumes anything coming from their staff is a lie. That’s an exact inverse of how they treated the Biden administration’s four years.
I’ve had a online back and forth with former Meet the Press host and podcaster Chuck Todd, someone I’ve talked to for many, many years. He has, for the entire time I’ve known him, maintained that there’s no bias in the media, and any claims to the contrary, well, he doesn’t have much use for.
The laziest of conspiracies and analysis is to concoct a “media” in cahoots narrative. It isn’t true, but the algorithms reward folks who spew this nonsense.
— Chuck Todd (@chucktodd) May 12, 2025
I paused and thought about it, and composed a response.
Chuck, we’re friends. We’ve talked for years. You’ve consistently defended against there being media bias. That’s like maintaining now that Columbia doesn’t really have an anti-Semite problem. Some things you can just discern after seeing dozens of examples.
What you recognized… https://t.co/LoyXiqui6l
— Duane Patterson (@Radioblogger) May 13, 2025
So now we’re down to proving something that’s obvious to the vast majority of Americans – that there is a bias in the media. I haven’t seen that specific issue polled, but I’d guess the results are about the same 80/20 as whether boys should be allowed to compete in girls’ sports. Some things are just intuitively obvious. But trying to prove it to someone actually part of the bubble is like trying to prove there is wind when you can’t see it with your own eyes. Sure, you can see the trees move, but that can always be explained away. Enter Megan McArdle, columnist for the Washington Post.
It is not a secret that almost every journalist in legacy media votes for Democrats. As did I–the difference was that I was voting for him only for “Not Trump” reasons, so I didn’t have the same desire for him to be all right.
— Megan McArdle (@asymmetricinfo) May 13, 2025
She was referring to what she knew about Biden’s mental and physical condition and when she knew it. Truth be told, it wasn’t important to her. She was, and is a Never Trumper, so that animated her decision making. There’s zero chance this viewpoint isn’t shared widely in Beltway media. I asked Chuck about this, and whether this might impact his claim that there’s no media bias.
It’s always fascinating to me when partisan folks criticize media they don’t like for being biased. Perhaps the thinking is a criminal is better at identifying other criminals? Point is, I don’t take partisans seriously when they complain about so-called “bias”
— Chuck Todd (@chucktodd) May 14, 2025
That’s a terrific counterjab to discredit me, but it’s non-responsive. You’ll notice he didn’t address McArdle’s statement at all. His suggestion is because I’m a partisan, something I’ve never disavowed, it’s a disqualifying negative and allows me to identify other disqualified partisans.
I’m a Christian above all other things political. The road to redemption and salvation, to me, is through admitting my faults and sins, which are plentiful, confessing them, and then seeking improvement to get better and not make the same mistakes again. There is none of that in either the Jon Allen/Amie Parnes book, or in the Tapper/Thompson book, at least from the excerpts released thus far. There certainly has not been a mea culpa offered on the air from Tapper for not realizing sooner the White House lied to him and why he didn’t press harder earlier. He certainly has not accounted for being lied to on Russiagate and the Hunter laptop, either. So at best, he’s repeating the same mistakes. Makes one ask, why?
Media has a huge credibility problem with the American people. A Gallup study in February showed only 31% of Americans have a general trust of what they get out of media. Just over a third don’t have any trust at all, and another third are mostly negative. There’s only one way out for media to get their credibility back, and finger pointing at Democrats, complaining that they lied, is not the way.
Jen Psaki in 2022 made this claim while she served the administration as press secretary.
It’s not just blind quotes. Current MSNBC host Jen Psaki said it from the White House podium: “Sometimes [Biden is] hard to keep up with.” https://t.co/IjGkDpALuc pic.twitter.com/z4OjGPibmL
— Steve Guest (@SteveGuest) May 13, 2025
So according to the Tapper/Todd paradigm, she lied, right? Why in the world is she still on the air every weeknight on MSNBC in prime time with her own show? Why is former Biden campaign advisor Symone Sanders still running her own show on MSNBC on weekends? Why were they given shows in the first place?
Where are the tell-all books that get to the bottom of the true scandal of the last quarter century – who was running the country now that it’s been established that the cognitive and physical decline of Joe Biden was much more severe than previously reported? You’ve got a media enterprise in the nation’s capital whose sole job is to challenge the premise of the White House, whomever is in it, and get to the real truth. But we get crickets about who was making consequential decisions for at least the last year of the Biden administration? Why? Logic would conclude that one of the reasons why there’s no journalistic curiosity is because if that truth and scandal were reported as it deserved to be, Kamala’s chances would have diminished further. Her role in the coverup, being one of the people lying to media about Biden’s condition, and she would have been disqualified for office. The Trump margin of victory almost certainly would have been wider, and the House and Senate might have seen larger Republican majorities as a result.
I don’t frankly care if the Beltway media takes me seriously or not. I know what I know. I saw what I saw daily in Biden media appearances, seldom though they were. I heard what I heard. And I can safely say that after 30 years in this business, I have never experienced Beltway media as in the tank as they were. The Trump effect can be seen in trillions so far in foreign investments coming into the United States. The Trump effect also has caused a lot of reporters to throw objectivity out the window because they view Trump as an existential threat.
My humble, but sincere advice for my friends in media, and I do have dozens of them that are friends, is it’s hard to take them seriously when they won’t admit their failings in coverage of the Biden regency. If you want to regain trust, go where the story goes, not where you want the story to go. And I’m telling you, the story is who was running the country the last four years, and why there was no accountability in government. Why did the 25th Amendment fail as a failsafe apparatus against an obviously incapacitated president?
Find me a reporter that gets to the bottom of that, regardless of whether they lean left or right on the ideological spectrum, they’re going to be the first ones that lead the media herd back out of the wilderness.
