WATCH: Jake Tapper says the quiet part out loud about media’s incestuous ties to Democrat Party
CNN anchor Jake Tapper said during a Thursday podcast that the press has advanced the interests of the Democratic Party for years.
“The Remnant” host Jonah Goldberg said it seemed “indisputable” to him that the media would have investigated former President Joe Biden’s cognitive decline significantly more had he been a Republican or had President Donald Trump been a more establishment Republican. Tapper acknowledged the premise was valid.
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“If Donald Trump was a Bush-type, Romney-type Republican, the stakes would have been perceived as less,” Goldberg said. “But like, the one group of people who believe Biden’s ‘existential threat to democracy’ stuff about Trump was a big chunk of the D.C. press corps.”
“I don’t disagree with your general premise. And I think it’s unfortunate that a lot of the press criticism and journalism — and most known journalism professors out there — have been saying since the Bush years that it is the responsibility of journalists to basically take up the Democratic cause — capital D, not small-d — the Democratic Party cause,” Tapper responded. “And I think that’s unfortunate. I don’t doubt that there were a lot of people who viewed the world that way.”
However, the CNN anchor also argued that there are more complex issues at play than merely partisanship.
“I think it’s probably more complicated than partisanship, just because we contain multitudes — we’re people too, journalists — and I think there’s probably a lot of groupthink,” he said. “I think there’s probably a lot of intimidation.”
“I think there’s lots of reasons for it. I don’t disagree with your general premise — that is, if this had been, you know, Joe Biden versus Mitt Romney, maybe the press corps would have been tougher,” he added. “But … I also think the press corps was pretty unfair to Mitt Romney in 2012. So I don’t know that premise to be correct … it’s all very complicated. Which is not to let the press off the hook — or myself off the hook — but it’s more complicated than just ‘the press is partisan and therefore they didn’t report on this.’”
Tapper also asserted on “Open To Debate” on Friday that he didn’t vote for Biden or Trump and “can’t stand either party” — so it wasn’t partisan “bias” that softened his coverage of Biden’s decline. However, he then admitted that he bought into Democrats’ lies.
“What was shaping my reporting was, I think, the fact that, like, there were just a lot of people lying to us. And I should have just been more skeptical about the fact that they were lying to us,” he said. “But there were just so many people on the inside, and so many Democratic legislators, and so many members of the cabinet and everything, that were just completely gaslighting the country.”
Tapper has received backlash for writing “Original Sin” — a new book about Biden’s decline and its cover-up — based on his own failure to probe Biden’s cognitive decline while he was president. Tapper himself has acknowledged that he did not cover Biden’s decline sufficiently and that he reflected on his reporting with “humility” during promotional interviews for the book.
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