In May 2025, days before it was announced that former President Biden had been diagnosed with cancer, NBC ran a sensational headline: “Biden didn't recognize George Clooney at June fundraiser: new book.” It cited “Original Sin: President Biden's Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again,” co-authored by CNN’s Jake Tapper and Axios’s Alex Thompson, detailing how the president’s team concealed his cognitive and physical decline — and raising ethical questions about transparency.

Tapper now claims that the White House “was lying ... to the press, the public, their own Cabinet.” But as a journalist, Tapper’s surprise is both revealing and disingenuous. His book shifts blame to Democrats, ignoring how the media aided the cover-up. It’s the latest in a string of reputation-saving moves from a media industry in crisis.

Credibility in journalism — hard to earn, easy to lose — once demanded rigorous objectivity. Olivia Nuzzi was fired from The New Yorker merely for private contact with RFK Jr., not even for proven bias. But such standards already seem archaic. During COVID-19, CNN’s Chris Cuomo used his show to flatter his brother, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D), masking Andrew’s deadly mismanagement of nursing homes and corruption, behind jokes about Q-tips.

The abandonment of objectivity accelerated with Donald Trump’s rise. In 2016, New York Times writer Jim Rutenberg and Univision’s Jorge Ramos argued objectivity should give way to moral clarity. But this rationalization led to partisan reporting, such as the Russiagate exaggerations and slanted

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