CNN Host Jake Tapper finally admitted it. Conservative media was right. Biden was declining when he was in office. What we saw wasn’t a “cheap fake.” It wasn’t a conspiracy theory. The former president was not well, and he struggled greatly to do the job.
But the conservative media and the American people shouldn’t be so quick to accept Tapper’s apology on behalf of legacy outlets. Not until they show accountability. Not until they show us how they are going to change moving forward.
“My question that was left unanswered was okay, what are you going to do going forward to increase your humility a little bit vis-à-vis conservatives and Republicans who got this right?” asked Batya Ungar-Sargon, a columnist for the Free Press, after Megyn Kelly pressed Tapper on his failure to cover Biden’s decline.
“I think we know the answer to that,” Kelly laughed.
Tapper and his co-author Alex Thompson recently published a book, “Original Sin,” which details just how bad Biden’s fitness was behind closed doors. As a part of their book tour, Tapper and Thompson appeared on the Megyn Kelly show, where she held the CNN host’s feet to the fire.
Kelly grilled Tapper over his failure to report on Biden’s decline. She pressed him about a previous interview he did with Lara Trump, in which he argued that she had “no standing to diagnose somebody’s cognitive decline.”
Tapper told Kelly that he had later apologized to Lara Trump. Then he went a step further.
“Alex and I are here to say the conservative media was right and conservative media was correct and that there should be a lot of soul-searching, not just [by] me, but among the legacy media to begin with, all of us, for how this was covered or not covered … So, I mean, I’m not here to defend coverage that I’ve already acknowledged I wish I could do differently,” Tapper added during the interview.
But when pressed on why he is reporting on Biden’s condition now instead of years earlier, Tapper argued it was because no one in the White House would talk to him. He would call the White House and ask about Biden stuttering through a speech and be told that the “president was fine.” And that was good enough for Tapper.
It wasn’t a matter of sources not speaking to reporters. I should know. As a conservative journalist writing for a right-of-center publication, my colleagues and I were essentially iced out of the Biden White House. Even so, it didn’t take sources talking to us to break news on the president’s decline. A leaking White House staffer wasn’t needed for the Daily Caller to point out that Biden was taking the shorter stairs up Air Force One. Or that he was wearing sneakers instead of loafers after concerns of tripping.
I didn’t need interviews with dozens of sources to sift through public records of the former president’s remarks and figure out that the White House had to correct official transcripts to make Biden’s speeches make sense.
There was nothing stopping Tapper, Thompson, or anyone else from the mainstream media from doing any of what I did. This admission seems to be missing from their apology. And it is why we shouldn’t be so quick to forgive them for ignoring and covering up one of the biggest scandals in American politics.
Tapper and the mainstream media can apologize all they want now. They can express regret. They can cover Biden’s decline now, four years late, to the fullest extent.
But the media landscape is changing, and public trust in the media is low—in large part because of how they covered Biden’s decline.
So, what are they going to change going forward?
Will they reflect on their coverage of Hunter Biden’s laptop? Of COVID? Of their bias against Trump or their favorable opinion of the Democratic Party?
The professionals tasked with telling the American public the truth instead tried to trick Americans into not believing what they were seeing with their own two eyes. Until they show serious reflection on how that regret should shape future coverage, they don’t deserve to be forgiven.