By Sister Toldjah. Media: Redstate
Though CNN’s Jake Tapper and Axios reporter Alex Thompson are profiting off of and basking in the glow of the attention their just-relased book “Original Sin” has received, that shouldn’t let anyone in the press – including them – off the hook for how the corporate media helped try to keep evidence of Joe Biden’s decline under wraps during his four years in the Oval Office.
That’s the argument Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA) correctly made in the aftermath of the release of the new Biden exposé, which details, among other things, the extent of the cover-up in the Biden-Harris White House and even how far back Biden family cover-ups of health issues goes, which is much further than previously known.
For instance, after Biden’s son, Beau, was diagnosed with terminal brain cancer in the summer of 2013, the Biden family decided to keep it a secret, with the then-vice president “instructing his team to mislead the media about [Beau’s] whereabouts.” This included when Beau Biden, who was in his second term as Delaware Attorney General, would fly to other states to get treatments while using a different name. Physicians at the time also reportedly issued fraudulent “clean bill of health” reports about Beau Biden to the public.
For Sen. Kennedy, some in the mainstream media rushing to report on the details from the book and talking about the importance of the freedom of the press kind of misses the moment:
My biggest concern with all of this has to do with the state of the media in America today. And let me explain what I mean by that. I watched bits and pieces of the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner this year, and I listened to speaker after speaker, all Washington reporters, all defend “freedom of the press.” And I kept thinking, they wouldn’t have to defend it if they didn’t work so hard to undermine it every day.
The American people saw what I saw, what you saw, for years with respect to President Biden. And I’m sorry President Biden is sick, but we all saw the same thing for years. We saw a president who couldn’t finish a sentence without taking a nap. We saw a president – an elderly man – who talked like he was from outer space. He walked like he was underwater; you could bake a Thanksgiving turkey in the time it took him to walk across the stage.
90 percent of the American media not only never reported that, but when [some] Democrats and many Republicans raised the issue, they pushed back. And this is just one more example of so many members of our media squandering the trust of the American people. There are other examples – the Steele Dossier, the Hunter Biden laptop. I mean, I could go on and on and on. But that, to me, is what makes me want to stick my head in an oven.
Today, the media’s happy after Mr. Tapper’s book’s coming out, the media’s happy to report it. But none of them have taken responsibility for not reporting what was so obvious to the American people. Hypocrisy never takes a vacation around here, I can tell you.
In another clip from the same interview, Kennedy elaborated on what he meant about how reporters are continuing to squander the trust of the American people even after the book’s release:
I have heard one reporter, Alex Thompson with Axios, stand up and say, “We should have done our job, we should have reported what we saw.” Now, many in people in the media now are reporting on Mr. Tapper’s book. But I haven’t heard a single – other than Mr. Thompson – a single member of the Washington press corps stand up and say “boy, we blew that.”
And that’s what I mean by squandering the American people’s trust. Why did they do that? I don’t think they were in love with President Biden. I think they thought that anything that hurt President Biden would help the Republicans and would help President Trump, and it’s this persistence in practicing advocacy journalism that is destroying freedom of the press and the First Amendment in America today.
There’s either no self-awareness among many members of the media, or they’re lying. Because it’s so obvious. I’m not asking them to take my side on everything, I’m just asking them to be curious, to report what they see.
Not that we needed it, but as further proof of Kennedy’s point, former NBC News “Meet the Press” host Chuck Todd admitted back in April that many in the press were opposed to reporting on Biden’s decline because they thought it would help Trump’s campaign.
“The only thing I can chalk it up to is this, whatever you want to call it, this fear that some members of the media had sometimes that they would be perceived as helping Trump if they somehow diminished Biden,” Todd conceded during an appearance on Piers Morgan’s show at the time.
Though it’s depressing to admit, Kennedy’s right, of course. No lessons are going to be learned here outside of the MSM taking what was written in the Tapper/Thompson book and using it as an excuse to go full-court press on Donald Trump’s physical and mental health under the guise of “we’re just doing our jobs by asking questions.” It’s already being done, in fact – starting with, surprise surprise, Tapper himself.
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