Cable News Coverage of Jake Tapper’s Explosive Biden Book Reveals Each Network’s Agenda

CNN anchor Jake Tapper and Axios reporter Alex Thompson have set off on the promotional tour for their new book, Original Sin, an explosive tome of reporting on former President Joe Biden’s decision to run for re-election in 2024 and the alleged cover-up of his apparent cognitive decline.

If you’re reading this, you have almost certainly developed your own thoughts about the reporting revealed in the upcoming book, but your understanding of what it contains depends almost entirely on the cable news network you choose to watch.  So apologies to my pal Christian Finnegan for borrowing his bit, here’s what your cable news coverage of Original Sin says about you, or more to the point, what it reveals about its agenda, biases, and political point of view.

On MSNBC, you might be surprised that this book has barely been mentioned on air. A transcript search for “Original Sin” reveals zero mentions, and Tapper’s name has been mentioned just three times, including once during Alex Thompson’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner speech, when it aired live. Katy Tur and Ali Vitali are thus far the only MSNBC hosts to make mention of scoops revealed in this book. Now, to be fair, the promotional tour has only just begun and that’s likely to change — but enough bombshells have poured forth in the reporting on its contents to merit significant coverage from the news media.

It should come as no surprise, however, that the left-leaning network has little to no interest in a blockbuster book that claims to expose a White House cover-up of Biden’s cognitive decline in the run-up to the 2024 election. It’s worth noting here that the title Original Sin is not about media reporting of Biden’s age, but rather a critique of the former president prioritizing his own desire to stay in power despite warning of Trump’s threats to democracy, and waiting so late in the game to bow out, effectively ensuring a second Trump term.

Nobody close to Biden looks good in this clear-eyed telling of history, which is an indictment of the press as much as the White House. In 2024, MSNBC programming looked like it was coming straight from the DNC. Opinion hosts like Joe Scarborough went out on a limb to insist that Biden was sharp as a tack as late as April 2024. Other big hitters, from Rachel Maddow, to Chris Hayes, Joy Reid, and Lawrence O’Donnell were so fixated on warning about Trump that they entirely missed that the sitting president and Democratic nominee had entered into such decline that even his handlers thought a softball Super Bowl interview was too risky.

“Golf has a long memory,” goes the phrase about cheaters of the game. MSNBC, ostensibly a news organization, did itself no favors with its defensive coverage of Biden throughout 2024, and its reputation will take another blow as this book tour plays out — which might explain why there’s so little coverage of it on its airwaves. Not to mention, MSNBC’s audience, already in a precarious place, is in no mood to re-litigate the disaster of 2024. Even if it means learning from their own mistakes.

This brings us to the 800-pound gorilla in the cable news room, Fox News, which now boasts two-thirds of all cable news viewers. Fox News has been insisting that Biden is too old for years, and so, in many ways, the revelations in this book are vindicating. As a result, Fox has covered this book extensively, though much of its coverage has been not a substantive review of its revelations but instead predictable chest-pounding and attacks on its authors.

Nearly every single mention of Original Sin on Fox has come with a painfully forced dollop of ridicule. For the most part, hosts insist that Tapper is guilty of the very cover-up he reports on extensively in the book. That criticism overlooks the many times that Tapper and Thompson reported on the story in real time, and confronted Biden and his aides about his age and reports of his cognitive decline. Their work was neatly illustrated in a promotional video released by the book’s publishers, in a clear effort to get ahead of this very criticism.

Despite that track record, the coverage from Fox has been relentless.

Take, for example, Thursday morning’s episode of Fox & Friends. The segment started on actual scoops that have emerged from the book, but eventually the focus turned to a clip of Tapper accepting that he could have been more aggressive in covering Biden’s decline. It was an honest and forthright admission of some mistakes that was mocked by Ainsley Earhardt, who ridiculed the project as a way to “sell books.”

Or in the words of Harris Faulkner: “Now people are making money off books. They have decided to tell the truth now.” It’s a refrain heard often on Fox News these days, as if writing a deeply-reported book challenging a Democratic administration should be dismissed because of… capitalism? It’s a weird take for Fox, which exposes the emptiness of their objections to the book.

Fox News was indeed early to call out Biden’s age issue. But little to none of its coverage delivered any actual reporting. The overwhelming majority involved opinion hosts laughing at embarrassing clips of Biden, of which there were many. Sometimes, it involved mischaracterizing them, such as when the network reported he “didn’t know where he was” in a field when, in fact, he was approaching paratroopers out of frame.

It is true that age was a serious concern for Biden when he ran against Trump in 2020. Footage of Biden at the time shows a sharper man, through until he announced his re-election bid (don’t take my word for it — just watch Biden’s speech in Fall of 2022 when he announced — the difference from then to now is remarkable).

Of course, Fox News should eat up the revelations from this book. Yet still, I would be shocked if the network were to invite Tapper on their airwaves to discuss it, given the apparent unwillingness to lend any credibility to a competitor (not that Tapper needs it).  In the political kayfabe theater that is cable news, Tapper is too valuable as a heel.

So this pair will likely spend much of their tour on CNN. The “most trusted name in news” has been all over this story, particularly given Tapper’s two hours of real estate on the schedule and his position as a franchise player at the network. Thompson, meanwhile, is now a CNN contributor, having made a name for himself with aggressive reporting on the Biden campaign and administration for Axios, much of which focused on allegations of Biden’s cognitive decline.

Now, selling books via airtime may appear to some as ethically shady for a news organization, but it’s a time-honored tradition across the board. Virtually every cable news host who writes a book gets plenty of airtime to try to move units. CNN’s focus has been almost entirely on the scoops that were revealed, like George Clooney revealing that Biden didn’t recognize him at a fundraiser, or that a White House physician warned senior aides about the potential need for a wheelchair if Biden were to fall again.

Now, I’ve seen some criticism that Tapper and Thompson should have reported these scoops when they learned them instead of saving them for a book, which is a silly criticism makes little sense. They began reporting out this book after the election, at a time when sources would be far more amenable to leaking out these kinds of explosive details. Does anyone believe Tapper and Thompson actually would have sat on that Clooney scoop?

To fend of one last criticism that will inevitably come from Democrats, it was reported Thursday that the authors hired the head of the New Yorker’s famed fact-checking department to make sure the book is ironclad. They’ll need it, given how quickly this still-unreleased mountain of reporting has become a lightning rod for scrutiny.