The Free Press just published an interview with Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson about their book "Original Sin." There have been a lot of these interviews at this point so there aren't really any brand new additions to the big picture here, but I do think that Bari Weiss, more than some interviewers, focused in on the fact that the media completely missed this story while a lot of people on the right saw what was happening.

The whole interview is nearly two hours long but this topic came to a head in this exchange below where Bari Weiss argued that Joe Biden's presidential debate performance was shocking for two separate reasons. First, because a lot of people were shocked how bad Biden was and second because it was shocking how clearly and undeniably Biden's critics were proven to have been completely right about his deteriorating condition, something they'd been called conspiracy theorists for even suggesting.

Tapper responds (to his credit) by saying the critics were 100% right about Biden, but then shifts back to the fact that the Democrats around Biden were lying to everyone including the media. He tells the story about a younger, unnamed reporter who was essentially threatened out of reporting on Biden's condition by the White House. Here's the clip.

CNN’s @JakeTapper: Those smeared as right-wing conspiracists were “100% right” about Biden’s mental decline.

“We all should, in retrospect, have been much quicker to label what we saw.

There was a reluctance to say, ‘He seems addled. He seems like maybe he can't do the job,’… pic.twitter.com/0NX453lwoC

— Honestly with Bari Weiss (@thehonestlypod) May 29, 2025

So you really have these two perspectives on what happened here. One perspective is that the press dropped the ball and refused to see what was right in front of them. The other is that the White House was lying to everyone and that's why the press wasn't able to more aggressively go after this. Tapper came back to this idea near the end of the discussion.

I think that there is reporting that I’m proud of that is also part of the record. But on the whole, I wish these 200 sources had talked to us two years ago. And I wish I’d known what I know now. I would not say I was incurious. I would say that I was one of the many people who was asking about this and was lied to—over and over.

You have to remember, the Biden people were not only lying to the press and to the public—they were lying to donors, cabinet secretaries, Democratic members of Congress. A cover-up, and almost a successful one. Even though we all saw him aging, we didn’t know he had these moments of nonfunctioning. It suggests that there’s a lot of people in on something. And whether they were doing it because they believed it or they had been told it, at the end of the day, the Democrats did this. At the end of the day, the Biden family and the politburo—his senior aides— did this.

And yes, there were those of us who should have pushed back more. But if you can’t get officials to tell you it’s really bad behind the scenes—let me tell you how bad it is—I don’t know what more we could have done. And I wish that those people had been more willing to talk to the press.

Let's just take the bull by the horns here, so to speak. I know there are a lot of people on the right who dislike Jake Tapper and who think he's not trustworthy on any of this. My own take is that while Tapper is clearly not without fault, which he's admitted several times, he's also not lying about what the White House was doing. I say this because I've talked briefly with another pretty well-known reporter (who I also don't think is a liar) who said a version of the same thing, i.e. there were no available sources to question the president's fitness at the time. No one would talk at all much less tell the truth. This also jibes with what Chris Cillizza has said publicly. The rules of traditional journalism (as opposed to opinion writing) don't allow you to state conclusions without sources and there were no sources. The White House made sure of that.

In sum, what do you do when all of the people who know the truth are willing to lie?

I really do believe that much is true in this case. The people around Biden were all willing to lie and did lie making it very difficult for journalists who might have reported the truth to get it. And here I think we can probably pin this directly on Anita Dunn, the person running the White House responses to the media and the person who I have long believed was probably behind some of the strategic decisions about how Biden was being hidden from the public. Bluntly, I think she saw outright lying as the only path to a reelection win and she went for it and made sure everyone else was following her lead.

And yet, I don't think that explanation is enough. I don't think it absolves the wider media of responsibility. Sure, you were lied to by political apparatchiks and that made things difficult but in my view there's no doubt that the press would not have accepted the same lies from a Republican White House. Lacking traditional sources, the press would have leaned into videos (which don't require sources) showing a Republican president's decline, just as the right did with Biden. Instead we got articles full of BS about "cheap fakes."

It's worth noting that elsewhere in the interview we learn that even the White House (probably meaning Anita Dunn) was surprised that some news outlets bit on the cheap fakes nonsense. It was such garbage that they expected it to be ignored, but that didn't happen. Lots of media types ran with it as a defense of Biden.

Again, that's the problem. The White House was lying to everyone but the media were too willing to believe them. And I think the reason is obvious if rarely discussed by the media themselves. The word of a Republican is always suspect in the eyes of most major media journalists. The media may report what they say but they aren't shy about insinuating that it's bunk or disproven or unsubstantiated. On the other hand, the word of a Democrat is often assumed to be the voice of reason.

This is cultural cognition at work. People don't put in the work when the answer provided suits their priors. So when 85% of media figures are Democrats, it's no surprise that Democratic lies go down a lot easier and get less pushback. Republicans don't get the same treatment.

Note that I'm not saying journalists are part of a secret cabal having meetings where they discuss how to screw Republicans and help Democrats. Well, maybe some are but mostly that's not how this works. Mostly it's just likeminded people who find that likeminded Democrats just sound reasonable to them while Republican claims just sound dubious. In this case, the biggest political scandal since Watergate, Anita Dunn was able to exploit that lack of skepticism to Biden's advantage. Until the media can admit they were a big part of the problem here (and not just the unwitting victims of White House liars), we haven't really learned much of value. Or, put another way, nothing we've learned will prevent something similar from happening again.

Update: Another clip about this. Alex Thompson says the media's problem wasn't mostly ideological it was cultural, i.e. getting side-eye from other reporters. Again, I think this is right but he skips over the fact that one of the cultural connections most reporters share with other reporters and people in the Biden White House include their politics. Politics is just a subset of what made them so credulous.

Bari Weiss' response is exactly what I would have said. You don't need sources if you have video. Reporters could have made this case without sources they just didn't feel inclined to do it. They trusted their (lying) sources over their own eyes.

Axios’s @AlexThomp: The media’s failure to report on Biden’s mental decline was less about a liberal ideological mission—and more due to groupthink, intimidation from the White House, concern about being ostracized by peers, and a fear of losing sources. pic.twitter.com/3eQLuQSWfy

— Honestly with Bari Weiss (@thehonestlypod) May 29, 2025