“Original Sin,” the new book by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson, was meant to chronicle President Joe Biden’s decline—but in Megyn Kelly’s interview with the authors, it quickly became a mirror reflecting the media’s own failures. And in that mirror, Tapper saw something rare for mainstream journalism: accountability. “Conservative media was right,” Tapper admitted. “We got it wrong.” And while he deserves credit for acknowledging that, the reality is far more layered, and far more revealing than the book alone may suggest.
Kelly’s grilling wasn’t performative—it was prosecutorial. She didn’t just ask Tapper to comment on Biden’s condition. She asked him to explain why he and so many others failed to say what conservative journalists and millions of ordinary Americans had already seen with their own eyes as early as 2022. The staggering disconnect between what legacy media reported and what Americans observed was no accident—it was the consequence of institutional groupthink, partisan alignment, and the elevation of narrative over truth.
Tapper’s admission—clear and unqualified—was striking:
“Alex and I are here to say that conservative media was right… there should be a lot of soul-searching.”
Soul-searching, yes. But too little, too late for those who were mocked, marginalized, and deplatformed for saying the same thing years earlier. The real story, as Kelly pointed out, isn’t just Biden’s decline—it’s that the media helped cover it up until it was politically expedient not to.
It’s here where your comparison to Dirt, the novel pilloried because of the author’s identity, finds its imperfect but potent resonance. When conservative journalists sounded the alarm, they were dismissed not based on the strength of their argument but on who they were. Right-wing? Then discredited. Off-message? Then ignored. It was only once figures like Tapper, safely ensconced in the mainstream, began to whisper the same truths that suddenly the conversation became “respectable.”
So yes, in a way, this wasn’t Tapper’s story to tell first—not morally, and not journalistically. Because while he and Thompson are now cataloging Biden’s decline in hardcover, the conservative outlets were already documenting it in real time, at great cost, long before the media consensus shifted.
But Tapper’s acknowledgment matters. So does the reporting in Original Sin. As he noted, even top neurologists were baffled, privately trading theories about Biden’s condition—Parkinson’s, Lewy body dementia, something Parksonian—but publicly, the press corps pretended it was all fine. That’s the scandal, not just the medical decline itself.
And the debate? Tapper admits that watching Biden collapse onstage left no doubt that things were far worse than anyone in the White House had let on. But what’s more damning is that afterward, Joe and Jill Biden didn’t seem to grasp how bad it had been. The disconnect wasn’t just physical—it was psychological. They weren’t just managing decline; they were living in a curated version of reality that the press helped build and maintain.
