QUESTION ASKED: So, Did Jake Tapper Actually Apologize to Lara Trump for Their Viral Biden Decline Interview or Not?

While Tapper claimed Trump “saw something that I did not see at the time,” he has subsequently suggested that he was duped because the Biden White House wasn’t being honest.

“And I think that we need to be skeptical of everything that we are told by people in power. And I mean that obviously should be the mantra of being a journalist to begin with. If your mother tells you she loves you, get a second source,” Tapper said on PBS last week. “But we just need to remember that. Like, politicians lie. White Houses lie. Power is an aphrodisiac, and we just need to all remember that and not take at face value anything that we’re told.”

[Glenn] Greenwald said the exchange, which also involved The Atlantic’s Jeffery Goldberg, was embarrassing. “Watching a person who is 56 years old, who has been in… journalism for 30 years, be asked by Jeffrey Goldberg, ‘What is the lesson that we are all supposed to take from this?’ And then he says – as though it was the most profound insight – ‘We really have to remember that people in power lie… and, therefore, we can’t take what they say at face value.’ If I were to teach a journalism course to eighth graders, that would be the very first thing I would emphasize on the very first day,” he noted.

As he explained, it is hard to believe “Jake Tapper just woke up,” but he thinks the framing is part of a larger strategy. Tapper and Thompson reportedly hired a crisis PR firm to help them navigate the book launch, and Greenwald said he sees those fingerprints are all over the authors’ media tour – beginning with their appearance on The Megyn Kelly Show.

“[Tapper] kept using this phrase with you… ‘I look back on my coverage with some humility.’ This is the kind of thing that they tell you to say so that you seem like you’re taking accountability even though you are absolutely not,” Greenwald noted. “Like, what does that mean? You were the one who helped to lead the cover up that you are now… making millions of dollars off of exposing. It is a huge scandal.”

Related: Joe Biden, Jake Tapper, and the Lampshading of America.

In story writing, lampshading refers to having a character in the story acknowledge an irrational or unbelievable action by another character as such in the hopes of explaining it. For example, if a notably cowardly character inexplicably becomes brave in a certain situation, another character might remark how odd that was. It draws attention to the unusual event and tells the reader that the characters in the story see it the same way you do.

The issue is that lampshading acknowledges absurdity, but it doesn’t explain it. That is what Original Sin does. It explains the how of the coverage of Biden’s decline, that being that those closest to him were lying to others and to themselves about his faculties. It does not explain the why: why so many of our elites, our supposed truth seekers who go forth without fear or favor, so credulously swallowed nonsense so obvious for so long. While Thompson specifically deserves credit for skeptically covering Biden’s health when it mattered, the media’s coverage of Biden’s decline overall, and Tapper’s specifically, was indefensible. As Tapper said to Lara Trump in an interview shortly before the 2020 election:

Ok… it’s so amazing to me – a ‘cognitive decline.’ I think you were mocking his stutter. Yeah. I think you were mocking his stutter and I think you have absolutely no standing to diagnose somebody’s cognitive decline. I would think somebody in the Trump family would be more sensitive to people who do not have medical licenses diagnosing politicians from afar.

I suppose that, in isolation, it’s a good thing that Tapper said that he regrets the way he handled that interview. But it is insufficient to say that the mainstream media got the story wrong, though it did. It is insufficient to say that the Biden administration lied, though it did. It must also be said that Republicans and conservative media got the story right. And that wasn’t by happenstance, a lucky coincidence of reflexive criticism. They simply observed reality as it was plain to everyday Americans. If you had read me specifically, you would have known well over a year ago that Tapper’s “it’s just a stutter” absurdity was just that. (READ MORE FROM 2020: Tracking Biden’s Mental Decline)

Responding to Bari Weiss’ extended interview with Tapper and Thompson, John Sexton writes: The Media Just Isn’t Skeptical Enough of Democrats.

I know there are a lot of people on the right who dislike Jake Tapper and who think he’s not trustworthy on any of this. My own take is that while Tapper is clearly not without fault, which he’s admitted several times, he’s also not lying about what the White House was doing. I say this because I’ve talked briefly with another pretty well-known reporter (who I also don’t think is a liar) who said a version of the same thing, i.e. there were no available sources to question the president’s fitness at the time. No one would talk at all much less tell the truth. This also jibes with what Chris Cillizza has said publicly. The rules of traditional journalism (as opposed to opinion writing) don’t allow you to state conclusions without sources and there were no sources. The White House made sure of that.

In sum, what do you do when all of the people who know the truth are willing to lie?

I really do believe that much is true in this case. The people around Biden were all willing to lie and did lie making it very difficult for journalists who might have reported the truth to get it. And here I think we can probably pin this directly on Anita Dunn, the person running the White House responses to the media and the person who I have long believed was probably behind some of the strategic decisions about how Biden was being hidden from the public. Bluntly, I think she saw outright lying as the only path to a reelection win and she went for it and made sure everyone else was following her lead.

And yet, I don’t think that explanation is enough. I don’t think it absolves the wider media of responsibility. Sure, you were lied to by political apparatchiks and that made things difficult but in my view there’s no doubt that the press would not have accepted the same lies from a Republican White House. Lacking traditional sources, the press would have leaned into videos (which don’t require sources) showing a Republican president’s decline, just as the right did with Biden. Instead we got articles full of BS about “cheap fakes.”

Exactly. I don’t recall the media being anywhere near as deferential during President Reagan’s second term when he began slowing down,  culminating in his 1994 announcement that he was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s.