Whose Original Sin?
Original Sin: President Biden's Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again
“Challenging power is heresy inside Washington.”
- Cenk Uygur, The Young Turks.
CNN host and alleged journalist Jake Tapper is co-author with Axios’s Alex Thompson of this newly minted expose of the 46th US president, Joseph R. Biden. Amazon’s “blurb” on the book claims it emanates from “From two of America’s most respected journalists,” and is “an unflinching and explosive reckoning with one of the most fateful decisions in American political history”.
A Total Failure of Journalism
NI rather think the book exposes a total failure of journalism, because, as conservative podcaster Megyn Kelly says: half the country knew Biden was cognitively impaired and unfit to govern the most powerful nation on the planet. Half the journalists (right wing) did too. The only question, Kelly insisted on her podcast, is why the other half of the world’s journalists denied it.
Jake Tapper falls into that oblivious other half, I’m afraid. And no amount of allegation or rebuttal — that “we were lied to” — can absolve Tapper from his own original sin, which consists in failing to do his job, by asking questions and showing basic journalistic curiosity.
I still recall an interview on Tapper’s own network CNN — which Donald J Trump has called “fake news” — where Trump’s daughter in law, Lara Trump, raises questions over Biden’s feeble mental state. The problem is the interviewer is Jake Tapper, the author of Original Sin.
In the interview Tapper tries a “gotcha” question on Trump’s daughter in law about Joe Biden’s stutter and when she refuses to take the bait and instead insists Biden is cognitively challenged, Tapper throws his hands down on the table and aggressively insists she has “no evidence” of that. If the Original Sin was the Democratic operatives’ Joe Biden coverup, then Tapper too is a sinner.
Jake Tapper maybe correct; perhaps Lara Trump had no evidence. Except the commonsense of her eyes. We have all seen older people struggling cognitively and physically, so the phenomenon is not rare amongst aging populations.
A Lack of Curiosity
The real problem is not Lara Trump’s evidentiary basis for her clearly political claims; the issue is why a journalist as supposedly great as Tapper showed no journalistic interest or curiosity in Biden’s physical and mental stumbles including slurred speech and clearly muddled memories.
A US attorney and special counsel Robert Hur did as much as tell the US public and press that he could not charge Biden with the obvious crime of mishandling “classified” intel documents because a jury would find Biden a well meaning and sympathetic elderly man with a “poor memory.” Still, journalists on the left of politics showed an extreme lack of curiosity in Biden’s actual mental state.
Two Questions
So, I think we ought to raise two vital questions: whose “original sin” is it? Biden’s inner circle of political hacks or the disinterested journalists like Tapper? That’s first.
Second, what terrible impact is it having on modern democracy that journalists no longer hold a professional distance on their subjects so that they can actually speak truth to power? This is the true “original sin” in my view: the failure of journalism that allowed the “great lie” to be propagated in the first place.
Regarding the first problem, the original sin of the lazy Fourth Estate, let’s state the obvious. The apology people like Tapper are providing for their lack of journalistic endeavour is that they were “lied to.” Let’s put this in simpler terms in order to expose its folly — Gee, golly gosh, we didn’t foresee politicians actually lying to us! This is what Tapper’s defense of his own career path seems to boil down to, and, I suggest, that rather than erecting a powerful line of defense, this is rather a career ending move because it suggests that Tapper lacks the basic curiosity and bloodhound-like nose for a story, to actually be a real journalist.
Original Sin is billed by Amazon as “The book Biden allies fear the most." — Citing Politico.
But I am suggesting it is a book political hack journalists should fear most, because it exposes them as the frauds they are.
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Journalistic Ethics
According to Stanford University, The Society of Professional Journalists’ Code of Ethics enjoins journalists to:
Seek Truth and Report It. This includes fact-checking, not intentionally distorting information, identifying sources, avoiding stereotypes, and supporting the open exchange of opinions.
Minimize Harm. This includes demonstrating compassion for sources and subjects of stories and protecting the privacy of individuals. Interestingly, the code makes no prohibition to interfere with national security.
Act Independently. This includes avoiding conflicts of interest and corruption, and resisting the attempts of advertisers and special interests groups to influence the news.
Be Accountable. This includes correcting mistakes, inviting criticism, and exposing unethical practices of the media.
Journalists are required to support the open exchange of “opinion.” But that is precisely what Tapper himself shut down when Lara Trump embarrassed the Democratic Left with the truth that Biden was not fit to take a bath on his own, let alone run the most powerful nation on the planet.
Impact
As to the second question I raised above. What impact is the journalistic negligence of people like Tapper having on democracy?
As much as people like Tapper complain that Donald Trump harshly accuses them of being “fake news,” the reality is they have created a target rich environment of hoaxes involving Trump, from Russiagate to January 6th.
But the issue with Biden is different; here the real story is more the lack of curiosity by CNN as representative of the mainstream media. The problem is they have had by far too much journalistic curiosity for hoaxes about Trump including the impeachments etc (who can forget the perennial liturgy of “the walls are closing in”) and zero journalistic interest in Biden’s family, his political lies and corruption.
Writing a book called Original Sin, I want to suggest, is unlikely to help matters.
Even the title is misleading. “Original sin” in Christian terms offers an explanation — if such is possible — of how all humans come to separated from their Creator, the God of Israel and Jesus. Original Sin tells us how carnal desire comes to dominate and control practical wisdom.
In the opinion of this writer, the Original Sin described by Tapper does not completely reside with Biden and his handlers’ (all politicians lie). For Tapper’s Original Sin is fully complicit with theirs and originates in his corrupt desire to find Biden cognitively fit rather than investigating if that determination was wise.
So the true Original Sin, I suggest, is helping to destroy public democracy, and it is the peccatum originale of journalism’s untrustworthiness. The Fourth Estate has become a purveyor of propaganda and lies rather than a source of truth speaking the people’s interests against power.
A major problem with Tapper’s book, as a genuine journalist Mark Halperin points out, is that it does not expose a “cover up” because it never tells us of what the cover up consisted nor the identities of the guilty agents involved. Journalism 101 might suggest that any “cover up” worth reporting would offer us some information as to these important matters.
Let’s consider, therefore, the genuine sins and the ensuing damage to democracy when journalists fail to hold the powerful accountable.
Threefold Damage
First, journalists who don’t do their jobs commit the original sin of reducing the information flow to voters to assist them to vote with some sense of objectivity. Cutting off information in a democracy is like cutting off airflow to the human lungs! It’s not long before the living being becomes a corpse.
Second, biased journalism reduces the quantum of trust between people in a democracy. It is exhausting for citizens to have to do the leg work of fact checking media sources. It is reasonable for citizens to have voting biases but they will naturally want to assume media outlets do not. Today, most citizens no longer are so naive and thus are less trusting in general of information circulating in the social economy of modern democracy.
Third, and perhaps most egregiously, when citizens come to believe that the press, or a major portion thereof, routinely lies to, or guilefully misleads them, they may be apt to mistrust fellow citizens who extol those same sources of news, aggravating fissures in the body politic of nation and society.
What Original Sin suggests, therefore, as it does in the Christian story, is want of a mediator offering some redemption. That form of mediation which brings beings who mistrust each other together is always the Truth. In the Christian story, nothing short of humility and repentance, which is a full and frank admission that one’s life has formerly embodied a massive lie, can bear fruit in terms of mediation and forgiveness. Mercy comes to those who confess their lies.
My suggestion is, therefore, that unless the authors of Original Sin — Jake Tapper in particular — confess their wrongdoing as journalists, the restoration of health to the body politic of the US and perhaps other nations too, lies yet a long way off.
— Dr Craig Heilmann
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