Today marks the release – finally – of “Original Sin,” the alleged exposé from Jake Tapper and Axios reporter Alex Thompson of how the Biden administration covered up the condition of the former president. It has been a pathetic rollout with Tapper making a number of proclamations today that defy those he's made over the years. We are supposed to ignore his claim that Biden has a stutter, dismiss the videos where he offered up defenses, and overlook the way he chooses to ignore the complicity of his own network.

Today I want to address that last aspect, concerning the coverage CNN gave on the Biden administration, focusing on the content from one character in their stable, their former employee Oliver Darcy. During much of the Biden years Darcy had been the designated media analyst at the network, having taken that role over from Brian Stelter after his former mentor was fired in 2022. During his tenure, Darcy delivered all of the expected support for the Biden administration and all of the attack-Yorkie behavior towards the Republicans.

The reason behind looking at his work in particular is that in light of the revelations from this book it has cast a deeply negative light on the media complex, and not only did CNN deliver copious examples of this fractured reporting but we saw it derive from the columnist who was tasked with looking critically at these sources. So not only do we have CNN adding to the unacceptable journalism, but their resident expert on the press was not looking critically at the industry; instead he was intent on running interference for the Bidens with misinformation and outright fake news – the very elements he claims to hold others accountable for distributing.

To start, just ahead of the debate Darcy came out with his attack on “Right-Wing Media Figures” who he said were dispensing conspiracy theories on Joe Biden’s fitness. Today, this reads as pure comedy. “For years, and particularly over the last few months, MAGA Media has portrayed Biden as a senile, mentally incapacitated elderly man who cannot remember what he had for breakfast, let alone run the federal government.” Yes, how about that, Oliver?! And yes, of course, he was fully on board with the prevailing excuse from the White House, that dastardly conservatives used altered videos to smear Biden.

To support the narrative, these outlets and personalities have seized on Biden’s verbal gaffes (while ignoring Trump’s) and presented out-of-context video clips to their large audiences — a deceptive, but effective strategy that the Biden campaign has struggled to meaningfully rebut.

Yes, literally, Darcy called those accurate representations “deceptive.” Blatantly ignoring the obvious means he set himself up for sheer embarrassment today. He went on to energetically tout the debate: “The stage also will afford Biden a unique opportunity to puncture the narrative he lacks the mental fitness to be commander-in-chief.” This would be in regard to the debate that sank Biden and exposed the media complex.

In his then distributed “Reliable Sources” newsletter (not to be confused with our own media-based podcast) Darcy was looking ahead at the debate and essentially commanding that Jake Tapper and Dana Bash be nearly militant in their fact-checking of Donald Trump that night, as he was a voluminous prevaricator in need of comprehensive correcting. “Donald Trump’s propensity to spread dangerous lies and corrosive conspiracy theories will put the onus on Tapper and Bash.” Just consider the breadth of lies and conspiracies discussed today from that entire administration.

Another component of the media manipulations made to protect Biden was the attacks leveled at former Special Counsel Robert Hur, who dared to come out with honest assessments of what he witnessed as he interviewed the former president. The recently released audio clips from that exchange completely support what Hur detailed, yet there was Darcy playing the obedient waterboy for the White House. Instead of looking critically at the news or conducting unbiased investigations into the details, Darcy instead took the spoon-fed talking points from White House mouthpiece Ian Sams and repeated all of their defensive spin, like a well-behaved myna bird. He even suggested that news outlets had to walk back their reports they had made in covering Hur’s comments.

In a separate report one month later, Oliver detailed how many news outlets were altering their stance, seemingly, as a result of the transcripts from the interview being released. Get a load of this non-partisan read from the media maven.

In other words, the Hur report offered a misleading view of the president’s mental state. That’s a significant problem for news organizations, given that much of their recent coverage about Biden’s age was derived from that very report where Hur offered a wince-inducing depiction of the president as a “sympathetic, well-meaning elderly man with a poor memory.” 

He's not a psychologist and shouldn't have been making judgements about mental state in the first place.

Top news outlets acknowledge Hur’s characterization of Biden’s mental state didn’t match reality https://t.co/cwTswPo4DY via @YahooNews

— John (@jshan05) March 13, 2024

Last week we showed how Jake Tapper was the supreme hypocrite on this entire matter when he brought on a pair of journalists from the Wall Street Journal, They were two of the few reporters who dared report on Biden’s sliding mental condition, and there was Jake hailing them as “heroic,” even as we brought the video where he was delivering all of the criticisms he was now declaring to be unacceptable. And then there was Ollie.

Just like Tapper’s previous displayed blindspot, where he was calling the “cheap fakes video” defense complete garbage while his own network was repeatedly saying that very thing on the air (including, yes, Oliver Darcy), his condemnation of any critics of the Wall Street Journal report conveniently did not include what some at CNN were doing – that is right, once again, Oliver Darcy was guilty of the very behavior Tapper is now calling unacceptable. Engaged in the kind of baseless criticism Tapper calls unacceptable, Darcy was accusing the “Journal” of “Playing into a GOP-propelled narrative,” before lapsing into his own brand of errant reporting.

An examination of the report reveals a glaring problem: Most of the sources reporters Annie Linskey and Siobhan Hughes relied on were Republicans. In fact, buried in the story, the reporters themselves acknowledged that they had drawn their sweeping conclusion based on GOP sources who, obviously, have an incentive to make comments that will damage Biden’s candidacy.

Except the reporters said they spoke with hundreds of individuals for their report, with people from both sides of the political aisle. What Tapper is today calling heroic reporting by these ladies, Darcy called “shoddy journalism,” and used as his proof a series of quotes and critiques from prominent Democrats. Just staggering.

This past week @JakeTApper at CNN condemned anyone who attacked the "heroic" reporting on Joe Biden at the Wall Street Journal.

Meanwhile, at his own network...https://t.co/oD3q4l9jcj pic.twitter.com/Yx60lyBSFx

— Brad Slager: CNN+ Lifetime Subscriber (@MartiniShark) May 20, 2025

Consider just for a moment all of the revisionism and soul-searching in the press today over these revelations and “come-to-Jesus” style of mea culpas from Tapper and other journalists. It speaks to all of the problems in the press that not only are they refusing to address the problems they are engaged in, but their media critic was not only avoiding the type of objective analysis he was charged with covering, he was engaged in the very damaged journalism one expected him to be critical of, yet he was only adding to the deception.

About the only thing Oliver Darcy loves doing more than calling out those engaged in misinformation and fake news is engaging in those practices himself.

Editor's Note: The mainstream media continues to deflect, gaslight, spin, and lie.  

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