Do Not Expect the Mainstream Media to Honestly Audit Itself

By Jeffrey Blehar

Wednesday, May 21, 2025

 

Seemingly everyone in journalistic America read and wrote about the new book Original Sin, by CNN’s Jake Tapper and Axios’s Alex Thompson, over the weekend — except me. After waiting impatiently for a copy to arrive in the mail — it is apparently being delivered by snails riding sloths — I instead got a copy from my local brick-and-mortar bookseller earlier this morning.

 

You probably do not need to have the book introduced to you at this point, but if so: Thompson and Tapper purport to pull back the curtain on a four-year-long conspiracy by Joe Biden’s administration, specifically his “Politburo” of family members and personal aides, to deceive the American public about the state of his failing health. It is quite the page-turner of a tale. The details mount relentlessly over time, and the authors center the story around the web of deceit woven by Joe and Jill Biden’s closest aides. (National Review’s Audrey Fahlberg succeeded in getting her “advance copy” in actual advance and wrote an excellent summary herself.)

 

I plan to discuss the most interesting revelations from the book in a later piece, and there are many minor but revealing ones, notwithstanding the headline-grabbing blockbusters you’ve already read about (e.g., the plans to put Biden in a wheelchair). To name one that is being less discussed in current media coverage, Tapper and Thompson give a depressing account of the remarkable “reality distortion field” the Biden family erected around itself, superstitiously believing that to even speak bad news aloud within the close circle of trusted family was to violate a sacred taboo.

 

But that can wait, if for no other reason than that most NR readers knew about Biden’s condition years ago. None of this comes as a surprise to us, or quite likely to you. (For example: Here I am a week before the 2024 presidential debate with a warning that could have been issued by a Greek oracle.) In fact, at the end of last year — after the flaming wreckage of the 2024 campaign had finally been extinguished — I wrote this piece, which might as well have served as an advanced promotional campaign for Original Sin. In it, I said:

 

In spring 2021 — that is to say, only a month or two after Biden took office — our commander in chief was already having “good days” and “bad days.” I want to say that again: Already, at the beginning of his presidency, Joe Biden was showing visible signs of major mental decline. All of this was concealed from the world. And this man ran for reelection.

 

. . . I have provisionally concluded that, despite all the various financial scandals, crony corruption, authoritarian overreach, and third-rate burglaries in American politics, this is the biggest scandal the presidency has ever seen, because it runs to the core of what the presidency is supposed to be. For practically his entire term, Joe Biden has been, if not non compos mentis — on a rare “good day” — then at least severely mentally diminished or periodically incapacitated. At no point during his time in office has he been fit for the presidency.

 

. . . There is no getting around the revolting fact that we have been subjected to four years of a farcical semi-presidency, one whose drift is now so easily explained by the simple fact that Biden was little better than a front for an unelected committee of “top men” who sent us careening from one international and domestic disaster to another. We now discover that Biden was all along a mere shell of a president, a babbling Lear whose shameful dotage was kept in more carefully guarded secrecy.

 

So forgive me when I say that I didn’t even need to read Original Sin in order to agree with its thesis; it has long been my own. I also think that — given the new revelations about Biden’s longstanding and potentially hidden cancer diagnosis — it is an inarguable thesis as well.

 

But it is also incomplete. For as much detail as Original Sin offers about the machinations within the Biden White House, the one aspect of the conspiracy surrounding Joe Biden’s health that it fails to adequately address (beyond scattered mentions in the author’s note and elsewhere) is the media’s role in facilitating the conspiracy for four years. (We also fail to hear any of Biden’s younger and theoretically more ambitious cabinet members account for themselves on the record in any of these recent books – what did Pete Buttigieg or Gina Raimondo know and when did they know it? – but I’m less concerned about this because I assume all of these people’s political careers are over in any event.)

 

For now, we know two things to be certain: (1) Joe Biden was already mentally unfit for office even as he was seeking the presidency in 2019–2020, his condition worsened quickly from there, and his four years in office were a “front” for a small team of close aides who effectively ran the U.S. government, using him as a figurehead; (2) the mainstream media, with a few notable exceptions (such as Alex Thompson) either colluded or acquiesced in all of this right up until the moment Biden collapsed at the debate, displaying not only a stunning incuriosity about Biden’s increasingly vegetative comportment, but also gleefully attacking anyone who expressed doubt about his mental acuity.

 

So the real questions, the questions that reporters like Tapper and Thompson, or Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes, are actually best situated to answer, are left largely unaddressed: Why did the American media, in the aggregate, forsake its investigative duties? We are informed in these books about the Biden administration’s many efforts to deceive, spin, or bully national political journalists, yes; we are told little about why those journalists acquiesced so easily and at times enthusiastically. Were they really that easily fooled, when all the rest of us in America — theoretically less well-informed than they — were not?

 

I have already ventured to answer those questions myself, and at length. On the same day I wrote the column excerpted above, I also wrote this:

 

What the hell happened to the mainstream media during this entire period? . . .

 

I have an appealingly simple theory to explain the mystery: They didn’t miss it at all. Everyone knew, and the sorts of people who would have normally pursued these whispers about Biden’s remoteness — obvious enough from his calendar and the behavior of his public minders — simply decided not to because it was not in the best interests of the Democratic Party to do so, at least as perceived by the “herd mind” of the media, the left-tinged blob of assignment editors, investigative reporters, and liberal commentators across Washington.

 

Do you know how I know this? I know this because back in 2019, when Joe Biden seemed for all the world like a hopelessly boring retread with no chance of winning the 2020 nomination — when Pete Buttigieg, Elizabeth Warren, and Bernie Sanders were thought to be the main competitors for the Democratic prize — the New York Times was more than happy to report about Biden’s age. Once he captured the nomination and went into a quasi-hibernative “basement campaign” (timed perfectly to conceal his weakening state), however, that was it for any investigations into that topic.

 

I know this because in the fall of 2022, during that brief window when it looked like Biden might decide to pass the torch instead of running again, the window to discuss Biden’s age was once again open for the Washington Post: “Biden, turning 80, faces renewed age questions as he weighs reelection.” Once Biden chose to run for a second term — a moment of world-historical hubris — the subject went back into storage, verboten in polite commentary of real reporting.

 

I know this because the pressure to not venture the topic was immense, and I saw it come from within the media, not just from the Biden administration. . . .

 

The media want to tell us that they didn’t know? If they didn’t know, then why were they so eager to raise the subject when it seemed possible to prevent Joe Biden from winning the nomination, or discourage him from running again, but curiously not afterward? Why then such servile eagerness to act as Karine Jean-Pierre’s water boys near the end of the entire debacle. . . . In fact, what better proof do we need of the media’s purely instrumental interest in Biden’s mental disintegration than the fact that once it became impossible to conceal after the debate, they flooded the zone with coverage to push Biden out of the race, but once he was gone promptly never discussed him again? . . .

 

If the media chose not to explore Biden’s mental decline because of partisan allegiance to the Democrats or dislike of Trump, then they have forfeited their credibility in a devastatingly permanent way. In that case, they would have willingly participated in what I consider to be the single worst scandal in presidential history: a mentally incapacitated president concealed from the public and controlled by his advisers. If they have not done this — if they truly were taken by surprise — then we are in little better a position: We are cursed with the most useless media class in the world, a mass of despairingly hopeless incompetents who failed in the most important duty they were ever asked to perform in their jobs. I am not sure which verdict they would prefer.

 

I reprint at length here the accusations I made back in December 2024 for the simple reason that none of them have been satisfactorily answered yet. The blow-by-blow story of how Joe Biden’s loss of mental and physical faculty was concealed by his administration is an important one, but it is one whose broad outlines America already knows, because here in the real world we never shut our eyes and ears to Biden’s visible decline in the first place. This cover-up seems to have come as a revelation only to the very media types now breathlessly reporting on it. And that story — how the media could possibly have been intimidated, snookered, or persuaded to go along, or how they enthusiastically went along — is the story that has not been properly told. Those are the questions that have not yet been answered, the names that I fear will never be named.

 

Perhaps it’s unfair to expect people like Tapper or Thompson to answer that question, at least in a way that isn’t either self-exculpatory or professionally self-annihilating. That job belongs to us, here on the outside. The mainstream media cannot heal itself from within, not composed as it is of institutions where politics dictate personnel, and personnel is policy. The world of television and print journalism adheres — now more than ever, as its public relevance and financial viability are threatened — to lockstep progressive politics and a medieval guild mentality. Speaking out against guild practice from inside of it is tantamount to violating Mafia omertà. (Just ask former NPR business editor Uri Berliner about that.)

 

Biden’s grand fraud can be aptly described as an “original sin.” If a slew of polling is anything to go by, however, the American public also has not forgiven the media for their sins. After four years spent hurling every imaginable accusation at Donald Trump — Russiagate most obviously of all — the media spent the next four remaining decorously silent about the visible decay of Joe Biden. One need not engage in reckless speculation to suspect why a media so eager to tangle with Trump rolled over meekly, purred, and showed its belly to a new Democratic administration.

 

Given that many of those most eager to criticize the media’s failures propose merely to replace them with their own brand of partisan hackery, I don’t know whether national trust in the media will ever be restored. For the past 20 years, I watched those cords of trust fray, one tiny braid after another pulling itself apart while the center still held, until with the Biden cover-up, the coil snapped and unraveled with such finality that it seems as if most journalists haven’t yet realized they’re now untethered to the American populace. Biden’s decision to run for reelection — to run for the presidency in the first place — was a sin, to be sure. But to label it the “original sin” is to tell only half the story. That treats the media — which abandoned their position of public trust every bit as much as the White House did — as if they were Biden’s victims, as opposed to his enablers.

 

There are two original sins here.