The dishonesty of the legacy media knows no bounds

The last two days have shown yet again that from Jake Tapper to the New York Times, journalism's biggest names simply will not tell the truth.

They can’t help themselves.

Two days ago, CNN’s Jake Tapper faced massive backlash after announcing he is writing a book on Joe Biden’s mental decline — and blaming a “cover-up” for Biden’s “disastrous decision to run again.”

Tapper fully deserved the blowback. As the slogan on those 1980s hair club ads went, Tapper wasn’t just the president, he was also a client. Commentors on X quickly posted clips of him defending Biden’s brilliance and harshly criticizing anyone who suggested Uncle Joe might be a couple Rolling Rocks short of a sixpack.

If there’s one person who shouldn’t write this book, it’s Jake Tapper.

Yet. If there’s one person who should write this book, it’s also Jake Tapper. After all, his dishonesty and hypocrisy exactly encapsulate modern journalism.

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For decades, Tapper has served a walking, talking Democratic PowerPoint presentation, the embodiment of smug midwit liberal Washington reporting.

During Covid, his bootlicking interviews with Dr. Anthony S. Fauci were a master class in how not to hold power to account.

In late June 2021, just as the mRNA Covid jabs began to fail, he and Fauci started what would be a years-long campaign of blaming people who hadn’t gotten them for the fact they didn’t work.

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(I’ll see your sad eyes and raise you a Capitol backdrop!)

SOURCE

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Tapper’s smug mock-seriousness became almost unbearable to me in 2021. I once compared him to “a dog watching a chess match,” one of my all-time favorite quotes:

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So should anyone be surprised that Tapper is trying to rewrite history and blame the Biden White House for the job he and his Washington colleagues failed to do?

Biden barely campaigned in 2020 and was obviously failing even by 2021, as the videos of him wandering across stages and shaking hands with thin air piled up.

Had the Republicans not stumbled in the 2022 midterms, Biden would probably have had to announce in early 2023 he was not running for reelection. Instead, he and the Democrats held on to just enough support that they and their media acolytes believed they could drag him over the line one more time — never mind that he would be 86 by 2029. They essentially ended his unscripted public appearances, even in small groups, and sharply curtailed his schedule. Even some Cabinet members barely saw him.

But Biden declined more quickly than they or he expected, and by February 2024, when federal prosecutor Robert K. Hur released a report detailing just how weak he’d become, they were stuck.

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The next few months were low comedy, as reporters increasingly demanded people simply ignore that Biden could hardly finish a sentence even with a teleprompter.

On March 3, New York Times critic A.O. Scott wrote a piece headlined “For Joe Biden, What Seems Like Age Might Instead Be Style… the president has something in common with Beethoven, Wagner and Martin Scorsese.” Yes, that’s the Times — which fancies itself the newspaper of record — comparing Biden to Beethoven.

Only Biden’s catastrophic performance at the June 27 presidential debate stopped the madness and forced reporters in New York and Washington to acknowledge that the emperor needed memory care.

Now along come Jake Tapper and a co-author, Alex Thompson, who writes for the newsletter Axios, to offer “an unflinching and explosive reckoning with one of the most fateful decisions in American political history: Joe Biden’s run for reelection despite evidence of his serious decline.”

Oh. I guess I’ll pass.

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But Tapper’s epic hypocrisy wasn’t the only nonsense the legacy media tried to stuff down our throats on Wednesday.

In a piece headlined “The Covid Alarmists Were Closer to the Truth Than Anyone Else,” David Wallace-Wells, a professional Covid and climate hysteric for the New York Times, continued to sound the drums about Covid.

Hard lockdowners like Wallace-Wells simply cannot admit that they overreacted to a virus with a 0.3 percent fatality rate that killed almost no one who was not already close to death.

Because they won’t, they are stuck claiming the Covid vaccines (by which they always mean the mRNAs) made a major difference to the end of Covid and the return to normality. Here’s what Wallace-Wells wrote on Wednesday:

In some countries where vaccination was closer to universal than here, such as Britain, shots effectively brought an end to the pandemic emergency.

And here’s the truth. Britain had vaccinated and boosted almost everyone at risk from Covid by December 2021, when none other than the New York Times wrote this headline

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Effectively brought an end to the pandemic emergency?

The reality is the opposite.

The vaccines had failed so badly by December 2021 that Britain was about to head back into lockdown. Omicron, not the mRNAs, ended Covid. Omicron infected everyone, and in doing so made clear to the uninfected both that Covid’s dangers had been overstated and that lockdowns and the vaccines had been useless.

Trust in the legacy media had been eroding for decades before 2020. But Covid and Biden’s senility effectively ended it¹. The lies became too big, and the gap between the reality of what people could see and feel for themselves and what places like the Times reported too obvious.

What’s amazing is that even now these outlets are refusing to have a proper reckoning with their mistakes and ideological blindness. If Tapper and Wallace-Wells are any indication, they think they can bluster their way through.

They can’t.

Oh well. Bad for them, good for me.

1. I’ll try not to call it the elite media anymore, I know that term annoys a lot of you.