Corporate Media Chose Politics Over Journalism
Corporate Media Chose To Lie, And So Here We Are.
The ongoing controversy surrounding Jake Tapper’s and Alex Thompson book Original Sin reminds us that the role of the journalist is to present news and information honestly and as objectively as humanly possible.
Original Sin is controversial because it shows just how badly corporate media failed in that journalist role when reporting (and not reporting) on Joe Biden’s physical and mental deterioration while in the Oval Office.
Rather than present the hard truths of Joe Biden’s demonstrable decline, corporate media chose to look the other way. Corporate media chose not to ask the questions others were asking. Corporate media chose to attack people for asking those questions.
Corporate media chose to lie about Joe Biden.
As much as Tapper and Thompson seek to deny that charge, the record of what they have reported about Joe Biden, contrasted with what they discuss now in Original Sin, leaves no doubt that corporate media as an institution chose to lie.
Tapper and Thompson, with their book, are choosing to whitewash those choices, sublimating intentional malfeasance into innocent mistake. That is yet another lie, one we owe it to ourselves not to let pass unnoticed or unopposed. We will never hear the truth if we do not call out the lies.
Corporate media chose to lie about Joe Biden for at least the last five years, and so here we are.
Contents
Holy Smokes!
When Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson appeared on Washington Week with Atlantic editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg to discuss their book, it was clear from the very first question that Goldberg wanted the corporate media establishment to get a pass on its reporting.
It was equally clear that Jake Tapper wanted to give corporate media that pass.
What I wrote on the iPad to communicate with the control room is what I was thinking, a very clean version of what I was thinking, which is, holy smokes. That's what I wrote, holy smokes. I couldn't believe it.
We had all watched Joe Biden through the years, and we'd watched him becoming elderly, but this was something else. This was…this was non-functioning. This was not able to follow his own train of thought. And, you know, this isn't just like catching him at the beach and asking him a question when he's not in the right spirit, not in the right state of mind. This is the debate where he needs to prove his acuity and ability to be president because so many Americans were worried that he didn't have that ability.
Tapper’s problem with this framing is that it is both contradictory and inaccurate. The contradiction is plain, as merely watching Joe Biden “becoming elderly” is not the anxiety Tapper concedes many Americans had about Biden in 2020.
To say that people watched Joe Biden “becoming elderly” is also not an accurate description of how people in general reacted in 2020 to Joe Biden being unable to recite from the Declaration of Independence.
Glenn Greenwald’s coverage of Democrat duplicity regarding Joe Biden’s mental acuity in 2020 is the far more realistic treatment.
That is a grave matter not just because the establishment wing of the Democratic Party wants to put him in charge of the world’s most dangerous nuclear arsenal, a large chunk of the planet’s health, and the welfare of hundreds of millions of people, but also because it directly pertains to whether he can sustain the rigors and spotlight of a General Election against the incumbent President. And multiple incidents over the past couple weeks — from Biden’s forgetting the words of the most iconic and memorized passage of the Declaration of Independence to confusing his wife for his sister to spouting sentences that make no sense — have only intensified those worries.
Had Biden’s “senior moments” been confined to the ones like the second incident Greenwald mentions, we could reasonably surmise the public’s concerns in 2020 would have been far more muted.
However, those benign moments were more the exception in 2020 than the rule.
Yet CNN’s own political commentators had no qualms in attacking Greenwald for even remarking on the murmur of concerns moving across social media about Joe Biden’s mental health.
Remember, this was in 2020, before Joe Biden had been elected President.
Where was Jake Tapper’s “Holy Smokes” moment in 2020?
It was nonexistent. Tapper also took up the Democrat mantra that Joe Biden was perfectly fine, infamously criticizing Lara Trump on air for her voicing concerns about Joe Biden’s cognitive decline.
Megyn Kelly quite appropriately skewered Tapper over this exchange last week, compelling him to admit that he owed Lara Trump an apology (to his credit, he said that he already had apologized to her).
If Jake Tapper had just a fraction of his 2024 “Holy Smokes” reaction in 2020, the debacle of a debilitated President Biden might not have happened, and we would not be at this juncture now.
Jake Tapper chose not to question the Democrat narrative in 2020, and so here we are.
Corporate Media Insisted Biden Was Fine
Despite the concerns raised by Lara Trump and others, the corporate media establishment insisted throughout that election that Joe Biden was perfectly fine, that he had always been that way. That is how you get tweets from former Politico correspondent Ryan Lizza enthusiastically carrying water for Joe Biden.
Corporate media personalities repeatedly insisted that not only were the rumors circulating around social media not true, they were the product of an unholy alliance between Donald Trump and Democratic left-wing populist Bernie Sanders—supposedly the second time the two campaigns had teamed up against the Democrat Establishment.
All of this feels very familiar. During the 2016 election, both Trump and the Sanders camp attempted to paint Hillary Clinton as corrupt. Now, both sides have teamed up on an attack against Biden.
We’ve all watched Biden stumble with words during debates and extemporaneous speeches. So as people committed to examining facts and evidence, it is important to gather what we know about this particular attack and not simply dismiss it because of the sources from which it is emanating.
As for Biden’s numerous communications challenges, corporate media’s narrative in 2020 was that they were all the result of a childhood stutter.
Even when the chattering class suggested that Biden should not run in 2024, which Mark Leibovich did in June, 2022, they took great pains to deny any sort of cognitive impairment or decline.
It all feels impolite to point this out—disrespectful, ageist, and taboo, especially given the gross Republican smears about Biden being a doddering and demented old puppet. No one wants to perpetuate this garbage. In fact, people who have had regular contact with Biden describe him as engaged with the day-to-day aspects of his job and generally sharp on details. He will sometimes mangle sentences, blank on names, get tortured by teleprompters, lose his train of thought, or not make sense—which is not so abnormal for someone his age.
But Biden is by no means the more eloquent character he was in his younger days. It can be painful to watch him give prepared speeches. His tone can be tentative, and certain sentences can become hopscotching journeys. His aides in the room at times look visibly nervous. Biden worked to overcome a stutter during his youth, and in general it can become more difficult for stutterers to conceal these effects as they age.
Otherwise, Biden deals with a fairly standard array of old-guy ailments. He has a spinal arthritis condition that his physician said might contribute to the “perceptibly stiffer” gait he has been observed with in recent years. He takes an anticoagulant and a cholesterol pill. He had a polyp removed from his colon last year, suffers from occasional bouts of acid reflux, and once had minor surgery to treat an enlarged prostate (you’re welcome).
Presumably, Joe Biden should not have run for re-election, but only a despicable Republican would suggest that he was cognitively impaired.
Yet the Atlantic—the same publication that in 2022 championed Mark Leibovich’s premise of a cognitively fit and capable Joe Biden—in its review of Original Sin acknowledges without irony the book’s claim that Biden’s cognitive decline was evident as early as 2017 or even earlier.
It is of course literally true that Biden could string two sentences together at the start of his presidency (and can now). But Original Sin makes clear that even before he launched his first campaign against Trump, Biden was struggling. The authors write, “Those close to him say that the first signs he was deteriorating emerged after the death of his beloved son Beau in 2015”—a decade ago. Tapper and Thompson point to recordings from 2017 of Biden speaking with Mark Zwonitzer, the ghostwriter of his memoir. These tapes, which came to light six years later as part of Special Counsel Robert Hur’s 2023 investigation into Biden’s inappropriate handling of classified information, suggested that the president had lost a mental step, or several. “He grasped to remember things, he sometimes had difficulty speaking, and he frequently lost his train of thought,” the authors write, describing the recordings and the special counsel’s sense of them. “Biden was really struggling in 2017,” Tapper and Thompson write, adding, “His cognitive capacity seemed to have been failing him.”
This is a circle which cannot be squared.
The Atlantic cannot claim that Biden’s dementia was unknowable in 2022 any more than it can claim it was unknowable in 2020, because there is too much in the public record proving that it was not merely knowable but that it was known.
When independent writers such as Bill Rice here on Substack could write at length about Biden’s dementia in the fall of 2022—just a few months after the Atlantic insisted he was fine—it is on the Atlantic to explain the contradiction between their erroneous Biden coverage in 2022 and the more accurate alternative media coverage.
Nor was Bill Rice alone in this. ZeroHedge also noted Biden’s rather severe memory lapse in September 2022 over the death of Congresswoman Jackie Walorski.
Nor is there any doubt about the incident itself. Like most Presidential moments, it was captured on video.
That gaffe was a perfect opportunity for corporate media to probe more fully into Biden’s mental competence, yet when The Hill reported on it, it chose to play along with White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre’s non-answer.
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre was asked about the incident during a press briefing later Wednesday.
“The president was naming the congressional champions on this issue and was acknowledging her incredible work,” Jean-Pierre said, adding multiple times that Walorski was “top of mind” for Biden.
Biden will welcome Walorski’s family to the White House on Friday to sign a bill renaming a Veterans Affairs clinic after the late congresswoman, Jean-Pierre said.
“I don’t think it’s all that unusual to have someone top of mind, especially as there’s a big event — two big events, today and also Friday — that’s going to occur,” she added.
Several paragraphs down in that same piece The Hill noted that Donald Trump, Jr., and others had reacted to the gaffe to remind people yet again about their questions regarding Joe Biden’s mental fitness.
The incident did not get much more attention the following month when The Hill ran a piece on Joe Biden’s age as a growing campaign liability for 2024.
When The Hill made mention of Biden reaching his 80th birthday in November of 2022, the Walorski moment was simply ignored.
The moments were there for corporate media to ask the questions others were asking.
Corporate media simply chose not to ask the questions. We can see by the absence of those questions in the corporate media treatments of those moments that corporate media chose not to challenge the White House narrative that Joe Biden was fine.
Corporate media chose not to question the Democrat narrative in 2022, and so here we are.
Corporate Media DID Cover For Joe Biden
Given the wealth of evidence that corporate media was not merely derelict during the Biden Presidency, but downright duplicitous, it is darkly comical that Jeffrey Goldberg wants so badly to validate corporate media, and dispel the notion that it was derelict and duplicitous.
Yet midway through the interview with Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson, that is exactly the point Goldberg sought to make.
Jeffrey Goldberg: One of the interesting subjects here that's come out in the past week, as you guys are talking about the book, is the role of the media. I don't want to do like extended media criticism here, especially because I'm not sure it's actually correct. You were doing reporting.
Alex Thompson: That's true.
Jeffrey Goldberg: In 2023. You were bringing this up. There's a quote that I want to show you. It's actually, I mean, it's not just you guys. Ezra Klein was asking questions in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal. I want to show you a quote from Mark Leibovich writing in The Atlantic in June of 2022. I mean, and the article is called Why Biden Shouldn't Run in 2024. “Biden is by no means the more eloquent character he was in his younger days. It could be painful to watch him give prepared speeches. His tone could be tentative and certain sentences can become hopscotching journeys. His aides in the room look visibly nervous at times...” and so on.
The Mark Leibovich article Goldberg quotes is the same one I cite above, and it explicitly rejects any notion of Biden being cognitively impaired. The very thing that Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson document in Original Sin is the very thing Mark Leibovich insisted in 2022 was not the case. Mark Leibovich is “Exhibit A” that Goldberg is quite wrong about corporate media not covering for Joe Biden. Mark Leibovich went out of his way to reaffirm Joe Biden was cognitively capable at a time when Biden demonstrably was not.
Goldberg and Tapper then practically dislocate their shoulders patting themselves on the back for being “serious” journalists.
Jeffrey Goldberg: I don't understand how this narrative has developed that the media was covering for Biden. I think what might be going on here is a lack of understanding about how reporting works. In order to prove that he's diminished, you have to have people… sources inside telling you this. Give me your thoughts on this question.
Jake Tapper: Certainly, there were a lot of folks in the conservative media, in the pro-Trump media, at Fox and elsewhere, who were running clips of Biden and saying, I think, One Fox anchor called him Joe Sippy Cup Biden or whatever. They were saying things along those lines. And they were making a bigger deal about doubts about his acuity than, it could be said, the legacy media was. And I think that's fair for them to say, we were making a bigger deal. But as you point out, there is a difference. And I'm not belittling the importance of airing those clips. I aired some of them, too. There is a difference between airing a clip and saying, that's odd, that's unusual, he seems… It seems like something's going on.
And what Alex and I have been able to do, which is after the election, all those Democrats, we talked to more than 200 sources for this book, almost all of them Democrats, almost all of them after the election, who were telling us what was really going on behind the scenes. And the anecdotes and the concerns that we bring forward in this book is investigative journalism, and that is different from observational punditry.
This view of how corporate media has acquitted itself over the past five years requires that one ignore Ryan Lizza’s outright gaslighting in 2020, as well as Jake Tapper’s condescension of Lara Trump—the same condescension he is now compelled to admit was wrong on every level.
This view of how corporate media has acquitted itself ignores Alex Thompson’s own banal coverage of Biden’s debate debacle last year, the disaster which catalyzed Biden’s eventual withdrawal from the election.
The past 36 hours showcased two Joe Bidens: the veteran president rallying voters in a swing state, and an 81-year-old man struggling to string thoughts together in a debate.
The notion of there being “two” Joe Bidens, one senile and one not, is pure hoakum. While dementia patients have good days and bad, once dementia sets in there are no days where the dementia patient is not suffering from dementia. The idea that last year there were “two” Joe Bidens is a subtle dismissal of the dementia issue.
By talking around the term, Alex Thompson cowardly checked off a number of factual items but conspicuously avoided providing the relevant connective tissue that he was describing classic dementia symptoms.
Between the lines: Biden's miscues and limitations are more familiar inside the White House.
The time of day is important as to which of the two Bidens will appear.
From 10am to 4pm, Biden is dependably engaged — and many of his public events in front of cameras are held within those hours.
Outside of that time range or while traveling abroad, Biden is more likely to have verbal miscues and become fatigued, aides told Axios.
How remarkable that Alex Thompson provided a summation of “sundowning” without noting that he was describing the common dementia-related phenomenon!
Before the debate, in 2023, Thompson was content to portray Biden’s obvious issues as merely a case of being “old”.
Why it matters: Current and former aides say Biden is extraordinarily energetic for his age. But his repeated insistence that he feels so young can draw eye rolls: Some current and former aides believe Biden doesn't realize how old he can come across.
In conversations with aides and friends, Biden frequently says some version of: "I feel so much younger than my age."
Managing Biden's schedule and energy has become crucial to his re-election campaign, given widespread voter concerns about his ability to do the job until January 2029, when he'll be 86.
Thompson also sought to equivocate by intimating Donald Trump presented similar concerns over age and health.
Jake Tapper is right that there is a difference between “observational punditry” and “investigative journalism.”
What Jake Tapper gets wrong is that he and Alex Thompson did their “investigative journalism” far too late for it to be a serious journalistic endeavor. For Original Sin to qualify as journalism it would have had to have been done in 2023 or in spring of 2024, after Robert Hur’s Special Counsel report was released.
Hur’s acknowledgement that Joe Biden was too senile to be tried for mishandling classified documents was the last notable journalistic opportunity for the “deep dive” into Biden’s cognitive decline Original Sin purports to be.
Despite the gaffes and the “senior moments”, neither Jake Tapper nor Alex Thompson asked the questions in 2023 and 2024 the asked after the election. The issues were present in 2023 and 2024, but Tapper and Thompson chose not to pursue them.
By waiting until after the election, Tapper and Thompson have provided not “journalism” but an early historical treatment of the 2024 election. It is telling about the state of corporate media journalism that neither Jake Tapper nor Alex Thompson, nor even Jeffrey Goldberg are able to tell the difference.
Tapper and Thompson chose not to question the Democrat narrative in 2022, 2023, or 2024, and so here we are.
About Kamala
No understanding of the rationale behind sustaining the Biden Charade would be complete without at least a mention of one of the key elements of that rationale: Vice President Kamala Harris.
One reason Democrats were convinced that Joe Biden was their best bet to beat Donald Trump in last year’s election was that Kamala Harris throughout the Biden Presidency underperformed and failed to impress. Even as he argued in 2022 that Joe Biden should not run again in 2024, Mark Leibovich had to concede that Kamala Harris had not used her term as Vice President to polish her “Presidential” bona fides.
The other rationale for Biden to run would be the gnawing riddle of: If not him, then who? “Don’t compare me to the almighty. Compare me to the alternative,” Biden used to say during the 2020 campaign. Four more years of Trump proved a sufficiently appalling “alternative” to land Biden in the White House in 2020, but it would be nice if Democrats had an obvious alternative to step in for the guy whom only 29 percent of Americans and 48 percent of Democrats want to see run again in 2024. Vice President Kamala Harris has not exactly asserted herself as the clamored-for heir apparent.
It says something of the Democratic Party that a senile octagenarian was viewed by the party as the best bet for beating Donald Trump!
Kamala Harris’ lack of support for a Presidential run in lieu of Biden was particularly evident in the aftermath of the Robert Hur report—perhaps the last “good” opportunity to have Joe Biden step aside without suffering major electoral losses.
Even after the June debate debacle, Kamala Harris was still polling worse than Joe Biden.
Corporate media pundits emphasized this in February of last year. Even as Ezra Klein argued for Biden to not run for re-election, he acknowledged that Kamala Harris was not seen as a viable alternative (although he personally disagreed with that assessment).
Everybody I have talked about this, literally everybody, has brought up the same fear. Call it the Kamala Harris problem. In theory, she should be the favorite. But she polls slightly worse than Biden. Democrats don’t trust that she would be a stronger candidate. But they worry that if she wasn’t chosen it would rip the party apart. I think this is wrong on two levels.
Jennifer Palmieri rebutted Klein’s thesis by arguing he was the strongest Democrat against Donald Trump.
Biden polls better against Trump than any other Democrat. To be fair, Biden has nationwide name recognition, which gives him a distinct advantage in polls. But the fact remains that he still polls better against Trump than potential contenders such as Vice President Kamala Harris, California Gov. Gavin Newsom or Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer. If the polls suggested that any of these Democrats might do better than Biden, they could have challenged him. Yet, none of them thought it wise to do so and, instead, signed up to be co-chairs of Biden’s campaign.
Alex Thompson also reported just after Biden did withdraw from the race that concerns about Kamala Harris were a factor in Biden initially refusing to step aside after the debate debacle.
President Biden hesitated to drop his re-election campaign in part because he and his senior advisers worried that Vice President Kamala Harris wasn't up to taking on Donald Trump, according to three Biden aides familiar with recent talks about his plans.
Why it matters: Biden, 81, ultimately decided to withdraw under pressure from the party and endorsed Harris, but his private anxieties reflect broader questions among some Democratic leaders about Harris as their nominee this November.
Those concerns were certainly not helped by the uncomfortable reality of polling numbers showing that Kamala Harris reaped no benefit from Biden’s debate disaster.
Even as it became plain to the entire nation that Joe Biden suffered from dementia, Democrats nationwide still preferred him to the presumably cogent and cognitively competent Kamala Harris.
Kamala Harris never found her footing as Vice President, and struggled with the role from the beginning. It did not help that there was friction between Harris’ staff and Biden’s, which, based on Alex Thompson’s reporting from 2021, started early.
But some on the Biden campaign and now the Biden White House think Meena is, well, too ambitious — at least when it comes to leveraging her relationship with her aunt, Vice President KAMALA HARRIS.
After President JOE BIDEN’s relatives appeared to profit offof his status as senator and vice president, the Biden White House is trying to avoid any repeats by establishing firm ethical standards for family members.
That she only fitfully embraced the “border czar” mantle, choosing to maintain the narrowest of briefs (while failing to articulate this to the broader public), has been reported as a contributing factor to the debacle of Joe Biden’s border policies.
Vice President Kamala Harris and her office made clear to others in the administration that her responsibilities began and ended with the factors driving people to leave Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador — the issue Biden had assigned her to examine.
Even as the demographics and dynamics of mass migration moved away from the “Northern Triangle” countries, Harris kept her focus there.
Both within the White House and throughout the Democratic base, right up until Kamala Harris received Joe Biden’s belated endorsement, the prevailing sentiment was that she was a worse choice for President than Joe Biden, and that Harris invoking the 25th Amendment was a worse choice than rolling America’s national security dice on a senile Joe Biden.
These are astounding assessments of any political figure, and on their own should damn the Democrats for all time from ever being seen as a serious political party. Yet the evidence is quite substantial that was a key reasoning behind the continuing the Biden Charade.
Only after she received Biden’s endorsement did corporate media rally around her candidacy, pretending that all the negative commentary about a Harris Presidential never happened.
Corporate media chose not to question the shifting narrative on Kamala Harris in 2024, and so here we are.
All Facts Matter
One of the commitments I make with All Facts Matter is to avoid becoming attached to any single narrative.
Every honest examination of any issue rests on the ability to look as dispassionately as possible at the known facts. Complete objectivity is always the journalistic ideal.
All journalists have biases that color their work—and I am no different in this regard—but reason and evidence can still be presented in a mostly objective manner even in the presence of bias.
Part of that objective presentation is to be honest and forthright about one’s biases. That was why, in the wake of Joe Biden stepping aside in last year’s election, I made a point of stating my political support for Donald Trump.
This was not merely a statement that I was climbing on the “Trump Train 2024”. It was an acknowledgement of what by then had become obvious to me: in analyzing the lawfare cases against Donald Trump, and then watching the Democrats shambolic response to the June 2024 debate debacle, my own reactions to these events had simply pushed me into the Trump camp.
To suggest that I was still somehow completely neutral would have been dishonest.
To suggest that I was still somehow completely neutral would have betrayed my ambitions for this publication.
The corporate media outlets have not been neutral in covering Joe Biden any more than they have been neutral in covering Donald Trump. As we saw from Jake Tapper in 2020, corporate media personalities were quite willing to advocate on Joe Biden’s behalf in the course of interviewing political figures.
Corporate media figures like Ryan Lizza were quite willing to tweet out advocacy for Joe Biden and outright rejection of any suggestion Joe Biden had dementia even in 2020. Mark Leibovich was willing in 2022 to declare Joe Biden cognitively competent. Alex Thompson was quite willing in 2023 and 2024 to tap dance around the dementia symptoms that by then were obvious.
Corporate media figures were all too willing to ignore the evidence of Biden’s cognitive deficits in furtherance of a narrative that Joe Biden was, somehow, the necessary man. Nothing which challenged that narrative was to be tolerated.
Only after that debate disaster was corporate media willing to “reveal” that Biden had been in decline for quite some time ahead of that debate. Only after that debate disaster did the necessary man become, suddenly, unnecessary.
That is the epitome of bias. That is undeclared bias, the sort of bias that in reporting amounts to an ongoing lie.
The reality for corporate media is that there was very little to “reveal” about Joe Biden’s dementia. The facts on Joe Biden’s cognitive decline have always been out there.
The tweets have always been out there.
The video clips have always been out there.
The reasons to ask the questions have always been out there.
Goldberg and Tapper are wrong to argue that journalists can do nothing if sources will not answer questions. That is not true.
Journalists can report that they asked the question, and that an answer was not forthcoming. Journalists often report that very thing.
Corporate media did not do that with Joe Biden. They certainly did not publicly ask those hard questions, nor did they use their reporting to publicly pressure for answers.
Instead, corporate media lied.
Corporate media chose to lie about the Biden Charade at least since 2020, and so here we are.
The only thing worse than a liar is a liar that's also a hypocrite!
Democrat Duplicity
Legacy MSM collusion
A Blatant Conspiracy to not report 🛑 what was obvious to millions of people and then to deny, delay and discredit 🤐🚫✂️ anyone who wrote or said ✍🏼📰📺📡 different....
...they're behavior was criminal🚔 and immoral.
🐀 Jake /Alex 😒📢 are on a major nationwide <deflection> 🎭♠️🤮🤡🎪🙃🎠🔄 🤫 roadshow!