David Catron writes for the American Spectator about the legacy media’s continuing failure in the story of former President Joe Biden’s mental decline.
Now that Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson have published Original Sin, which confirms what most Americans already knew — that former President Joe Biden was cognitively unfit to carry out the duties of his office — the corporate media are attempting to deflect attention from their complicity in a dangerous cover up. The “original sin,” according to Tapper and Thompson, was Biden’s decision to run for reelection in 2024 and the dishonesty of his aides. A far more egregious sin, however, was the cover-up of Biden’s decline by countless journalists who refused to report the truth.
This dereliction of duty presented a far greater danger to the republic than Biden’s decision to run or the lies of his aides. Thomas Jefferson once observed, “The functionaries of every government have propensities to command at will the liberty & property of their constituents. There is no safe deposit for these but with the people themselves; nor can they be safe with them without information.” The fundamental purpose of a free press is to provide that information by reporting what government officials are doing and why. Thus, as Marc Thiessen points out in the Washington Post, the corporate media cover-up was the real original sin.
“Americans began to realize that Biden was suffering from cognitive decline. In November 2021 — after just 10 months of watching him in action — a 48 percent plurality said Biden was not “mentally fit” for office. By June 2023, a year before his disastrous presidential debate performance, the share of Americans who said they had concerns about Biden’s mental and physical health had risen to 68 percent. Yet virtually every news organization in the country downplayed, ignored or helped the White House minimize one of the biggest stories in modern presidential history.”
Thiessen goes on to point out the deeply ironic fact that Jake Tapper was one of the worst offenders.
