Tapper: ‘Conservative Media Was Right’

David has already highlighted some segments of Megyn Kelly’s interview with Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson about the subject of their new book “Original Sin.” Actually, from what I can tell, the topic of the interview really wasn’t the book it was the media’s failure to see the matter of Biden’s decline as anything but a right-wing conspiracy theory prior to the presidential debate.

Kelly, to her credit, gives Tapper a real grilling here on his own failure to get this right when it mattered. To his credit, he acknowledges that he got it wrong and perhaps just as importantly, that conservative media got it right.

Alex and I are here to say that conservative media was right and conservative media was correct, and that there should be a lot of soul searching, not just among me, but among the legacy media to begin with, all of us, for how this was covered or not covered sufficiently 100%. I mean I’m not here to defend coverage that I’ve already acknowledged. I wish I could do differently.

In another segment of the interview, Kelly asked Tapper what he thought of the push by some Democrats to stop talking about Biden’s decline out of respect (supposedly) for his just announced cancer diagnosis. Tapper didn’t buy that and said it was clear some Democrats just did not want to talk about Biden or the media’s handling of this.

I think we need to be discussing this. I think obviously we have sympathy for President Biden both in terms of the prostrate cancer and in terms of whatever other health issue he is grappling with…We talked to one of the top neurologists in the world who is on a text chain with a number of other top neurologists and they spent much of 2024 trying to figure out what was wrong with Joe Biden, whether it’s Lewy Body dementia or Parkinsons or something Parksonian. They don’t know and they’re not qualified to say from a distance, but it’s a serious question. And the larger issue of transparency and groupthink, questions for the Democratic Party and the public and the news media. These are all really important conversations to have.

Later in this segment he returned to the conservative media:

I’m not disagreeing with the fact that conservatives were right on this and that people in the legacy media including myself should have been paying closer attention and more attention. I’m granting all of that. But the reason why I think there is interest in this book is because people want to know more beyond what they saw in front of the camera.

I’ve been trying to put into words what I feel about this as someone who is a small part of the conservative media Tapper is discussion and as someone who personally felt like this became a very real issue at least by September 2022 if not earlier. The thing that keeps coming to mind is Dirt. 

Maybe you remember this minor media scandal from 2020 when a white author wrote a novel titled DIrt about a Hispanic woman trying to cross the border. The novel was hailed by celebrities including Oprah Winfrey only to have a backlash against it from various people who were essentially arguing that a white woman shouldn’t have written the book in the first place. In light of the backlash, many celebrities distanced themselves from it and the author was forced to apologize.

Granted, this is not a great analogy. When it came to Dirt my sense was that either the book was good or bad regardless of who wrote it. Quality should top identity politics.

And I guess that’s the case here too, but I can’t deny that part of me really does feel this wasn’t Jake Tapper’s story to tell. Because the story here isn’t just Biden’s decline and it isn’t just Biden’s decline being hidden by the White House. The real story here is how they mostly got away with it and how the media repeatedly took their side and backed them up while outsiders (like myself, my co-authors and many, many others) were fighting the tide of BS that kept rolling our way.

Regardless of whether the book is valuable the fact remains that this is much more Megyn Kelly’s story to tell than it is Jake Tapper’s. Frankly, it’s much more Hot Air’s story (and dozens of other right leaning sites who also saw it at the time). We were telling the truth when it was uncomfortable rather than when it was profitable to do so. When will Penguin Books offer a contract to someone on the right to tell the full story of the White House cover up? Don’t hold your breath.

Speaking of the debate, here’s one final clip in which Tapper reveals what he was saying and thinking live during Biden’s collapse on stage at the presidential debate. He knew it was really bad but says that, afterwards, Joe and Jill Biden came up to him and didn’t seem to realize just how bad it had been.

Again, I’m not saying the book has no value. On the contrary, I’d still like to read it. It seems to me Tapper and Thompson really have added a lot of behind the scenes detail that is worth knowing about. Don’t deny yourself knowing more about this hugely important story just because you knew it was hugely important three years before the authors did.