Jake Tapper: Biden Cover-up ‘Worse Than Watergate’
By John J. Duncan Jr.
duncanj@knoxfocus.com
For years, Jake Tapper, the leading newsreader for CNN, has been very unfair to and very biased against Republicans in general, and to President Trump in particular.
Now, in an attempt to restore some of his lost credibility, he has written a new book with Alex Thompson of Axios about the Biden health cover-up.
He apparently is embarrassed and/or feels guilty about all he did in a very partisan way to try to keep a very unhealthy Joe Biden in office as president, but I will give him credit for now admitting to some extent how wrong he was. Of course, he is putting most of the blame on the White House staff.
I will not try to help Tapper in this personal campaign of his by buying his book. However, I have read and heard many things he has said and I have read some of the reviews.
He said: “Alex and I are here to say that conservative media was right and conservative media was correct and that there should be a lot of soul-searching, not just among me, but among the legacy media.”
In an interview with Piers Morgan, Tapper said the cover-up of Biden’s health by the White House, aided by Tapper and most of the national media, was “maybe even worse” than the Watergate scandal. In fact, he used those words three times in the interview.
He added: “It is without question and maybe even worse than Watergate in some ways because Richard Nixon was in control of his faculties when he was not drinking.”
In its story about Tapper’s book, the U.S. edition of the Daily Mail (a British newspaper), led this way: “CNN star Jake Tapper has been branded a ‘fraud’ and a ‘phony’ over his self-righteous rants about former President Joe Biden’s health cover up.”
The story said “many believe the journalist was complicit in Biden’s cover up” and added that early reviews “were quickly overshadowed by allegations that Tapper himself was part of the cover up and is now seemingly trying to rewrite history.”
The national media hated Trump so much that reporters were eager to jump on and exaggerate anything unfavorable to him and to emphasize anything favorable to Biden.
Tapper’s book apparently says that Biden’s inner circle “couldn’t believe how easily (the media) swallowed campaign lies” and how eager reporters were to say something Trump said was false.
Much of the mainstream media was doing everything it could to protect and promote Biden. They would never ask him tough questions or criticize him for not holding press conferences and for not having anything on his schedule.
In the summer of 2023, the New York Times reported that “people who deal with him regularly, including some of his adversaries, say he remains sharp and commanding in private meetings” and “he has at times exerted striking stamina.”
His two young press secretaries said at different times they were having trouble keeping up with him and that videos shown by Fox News and other conservative media were “deep fake.”
Yet, several months before the election, the Biden campaign tried to film a town hall meeting to use on TV ads, but they couldn’t use it because, according to the Tapper book, Biden “couldn’t put together coherent thoughts.” The book also said Hunter Biden was “effectively chief of staff.”
In a survey released on Dec. 30, 2023, Syracuse University’s School of Public Communications said the number of journalists identifying themselves as Republicans fell from 18% in 2002 and 7.1% in 2013 to only 3.4% in 2022.
I received my journalism degree in 1969 and worked as a full-time reporter for the Knoxville Journal, our morning daily newspaper, during my senior year at U.T. in 1968-69. I taught journalism for one year. In those years, newspapers felt it was important to have a separation between the news pages and the editorial pages.
They never would have allowed a reporter to use words like “obviously false” in what were supposed to be news stories unless some official made the accusation. Reporters were supposed to be reporters, not editorial writers, and especially not flunkies for one political party.
Finally, not only did they hide the truth about Biden’s health, but Tapper and the national media also pushed the story that Russia had aided the 2016 Trump campaign. After paying 18 very anti-Trump lawyers for two years and spending many millions of taxpayer dollars, they found no proof at all of this Russian hoax.
