The Jake Tapper-Alex Thompson book has been out for a week now and as the media complex continues to be exposed as the factory of partisan discourse, we are seeing the general reaction from the population. What was designed to be an exoneration of the press has instead been a constant exposure of how deep their collusion with the previous administration had been, and book sales aside, new public polling is delivering a negative result. 

One of the other revelations that has boomeranged back on the authors has been the insistence on how they have been journalistically responsible. They brag about speaking with more than 200 sources for their book, but this only impugns them as it illustrates the lack of applying that energy in their previous work. A new poll shows the public is well aware of this.

As a means of juxtaposing the media deflections and the public perception of things, I’ll first deliver a list of examples of media malpractice on the matter. The press reactions we've seen since the book release have bordered on desperation, with all manner of creative interpretations displayed and very little in the form of honest introspection. These are just some of the glaring responses to the revelations coming out.

We have already covered the glaring blind spots displayed by Jake Tapper, as he has at once sounded quite critical of his industry and yet remains mum about how complicit his own network had been. CBS News postured about how a deceptive White House duped them, but we're supposed to ignore how they were among the worst conspirators. We caught them complaining about deceptive “cheap fake videos,” but after mistakenly posting an accurate video of Biden’s meandering condition, they altered it to represent their claims; they literally made a cheap fake in order to “prove” the use of cheap-fake videos.

The Washington Post also tried to pretend they had been deceived, acting as if they were innocent bystanders. Chuck Todd tries to equate what is taking place today with our current president to excuse away the behavior we all witnessed. He resorts to the desperate “But Trump…” distraction, all while placing nameless “folks” in the same category as our national press complex.

To the folks shaming the Biden-enablers, I get the instinct, but the folks on the right doing the victory lap are simultaneously behaving the same way (or worse) when it comes to Trump and his bizarre rants/statements/policies that aren’t working/graft etc. To those folks…

— Chuck Todd (@chucktodd) May 21, 2025

This is the same Chuck Todd who last summer admitted to knowing full well about Biden’s condition at least three years ago, confirming things with agency officials. Joining him on that episode was Politico's Jonathan Martin, who tried to deny to me that he had ever admitted to such with Chuckles; he was bemused to see me bring the receipts.

Maggie Haberman also went the route of declaring that it was important to repair the press credibility of failing with Joe Biden yesterday, by going after Trump today. Then there is S.E. Cupp insinuating that Trump could be behind the current negativity hurled at the press, and that focusing on it is benefiting the president. She glosses over the fact that the hesitancy to report on anything negative about Biden would help Trump is the very reason this media scandal is percolating today.

Some of the most stunted analysis of this fallout from the book comes from The Atlantic. Managing Editor Jeffrey Goldberg was on his sponsored Friday program on PBS announcing authoritatively that people who are complaining about this scandal do not understand how journalism works. His elitist dogma fails to counter the fact that you do not need to be a J-school graduate to understand how lying works.

Even more audacious was his senior writer Mark Leibovich. The veteran of D.C. politics came out to state definitively that there really is not an issue with the cover-ups on display from the media because most people could clearly see Biden’s condition for themselves. This might be the worst assessment seen, as his argument becomes that it was acceptable for the press to have lied about Biden for years because most people did not believe what he and the others were peddling in the first place.  

So what have the deceptions, denials, and overall distemper seen in the press led to as far as public perception? It does not bode well. A recent Rasmussen poll on the impression this fallout has left on likely voters shows that three-quarters perceive this exposed reality about the press coverage of Biden to be a “Serious” or “Very Serious” scandal. Nearly half of the respondents - 48 percent - were in the “Very Serious” category. The biggest issue for the press is that Independents were nearly two-thirds as likely to suspect the press was part of the Biden cover-up.

Responding to the question, do the poll respondents feel the press had not been “fooled” by the White House but instead helped with the cover-up about Biden’s mental state, 63 percent saw this to be the case, with a heavy 43 percent saying this was very likely. On the other side was the metric shown by the other side; those who did not see this scandal as serious, a hefty 95 percent said they had no problem with the concept of the press covering this up. 

The media are in a grave position, and even if Tapper and Thompson see impressive sales figures that “success” should not be deemed as a positive. It is a sign of the exposure this has brought upon the news industry, and this is not being seen in a favorable light.