Tapper ratings dive after publishing ‘Original Sin’

With all the media attention “Original Sin” is getting, one would think viewers would be flocking to hear what CNN anchor Jake Tapper has to say.

The complete opposite is happening, and I think I know why.

Megyn Kelly

Tapper has been making the media circuit to discuss his new book, and he is trying to play the victim to justify not reporting on this in real-time.

Tapper has regularly claimed that the White House was dishonest and that he simply did not see what other people saw regarding Biden’s mental decline.

When he was on with Megyn Kelly, she did not bite, calling him out right to his face about it, telling him, "As you know, this book involves a cover-up. Jake, the criticism has been that you're complaining about a cover-up of Joe Biden's mental acuity—something that right-wing pundits, the right wing in general, and independent media all saw and reported on. It wasn't a mystery, even to left-wing reporters. They weren't fools, but they chose blindness over honest reporting."

She then ripped into Tapper about Biden’s lack of transparency, stating, "He promised you that he would be transparent about his health records, and then he wasn't. When you sat down with him again, about a month after the Jackie Walorski incident, you didn't ask him about it. You didn't follow up. He was falling on the stairs, losing his train of thought regularly, slurring, incomprehensible at times. You sat across from him and didn't ask him about any of that."

Stephen A. Smith

ESPN sports pundit Stephen A. Smith has branched out with a new show, and politics is on the table. He, like Kelly, did not hold back on Tapper, asking him about the allegations he only wrote this book to make a quick buck.

Smith asked him to address the allegations by the Biden camp and other Biden allies that this is a money grab, and he very uncomfortably responded, “In terms of the left, it’s ‘a money grab’ — I mean, that’s not the case. It’s not. This is — I don’t — I don’t want to get into where my money comes from, but I — I’m, you know, CNN is my main job and that’s where my main source of income — by far.

“Very few people write books to make money. You write a book because you want to say something. You want to have a legacy, you want to uncover something, you have a message you want to get out there. I don’t think people write books about Joe Biden to make money. We are — we are gratified that people are buying this book — but, but, I don’t think — I mean, the idea that I would do this for money is — is — it’s just — it’s silly and not true.”

Tapper is right in the sense that most people don’t write books for money, but people like Tapper write books for money, and they get paid a lot of money to do it. If I write a book, it is for the love the topic, but if Tapper writes a book, it is because he is likely to make a stack of cash once it hits the shelves, especially when his network has been shamelessly promoting it for weeks.

Tapper Ratings Crash

People watch news anchors because they trust them. Back when I was growing up, you looked at local news anchors as a family member, as someone you relied on to tell you the truth, good or bad, about what is going on in the world.

Today, it is all a show, but there are still a few good ones out there, and Tapper, until recently, was still considered one of those anchors. That all changed when Trump came into office, and it has gotten even worse since “Original Sin” came out.

The first post-book ratings were just announced, and Tapper averaged a mere 525,000 viewers from April 28 through May 25, which is a drop of about 25% from last year during the same cycle. In fact, was the worst ratings Tapper has seen since 2015.

It would appear that the few people who still trusted Tapper would like to know why he did not report on this instead of writing a book about it. I am honestly not sure Tapper will ever recover from this, as he thinks people are stupid enough to believe he was being lied to and did not see what the rest of us saw for years, even mocking us for doing so.