It’s a headline that reads more like satire than reality. But the corporate media is once again pretending to be shocked at new details about Joe Biden’s cognitive decline – despite having themselves perpetrated the cover-up of the former president’s failing health for years.

Since Biden left office, details have slowly emerged about the lengths to which top White House staff, Democrat insiders, and liberal media pundits went to cover up the president’s physical deterioration. But that trickle has become a torrent this week as details from “Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again,” a new book from CNN’s Jake Tapper and Axios’s Alex Thompson, have entered the headlines.

The book is reportedly based on interviews with more than 200 people and includes explosive revelations like the fact that Biden’s health was apparently so bad as early as 2023 that advisors privately discussed the potential need to use a wheelchair if he won re-election. Biden’s physician, Kevin O’Connor, also pleaded with aides to give the president more time to rest, and White House staffers were instructed to plan events so that Biden had to walk as few steps as possible.

In another instance, Biden allegedly did not recognize movie star George Clooney at an event, despite the fact that the two men had known each other for nearly two decades. Clooney would later pen an op-ed urging Biden to drop out of the race – but only following his disastrous debate performance against Donald Trump.

For Americans who watched the media’s fawning coverage of Biden for four years, the feigned shock and outrage of the commentariat class over these new details is as laughable as it is insulting. Do Tapper, Thompson, and their legacy media brethren really expect us to forget that they themselves paved the way for the cover-up of Biden’s cognitive decline until that lie became impossible to maintain?

Those of us with working eyeballs and an ounce of objectivity know that Biden’s unfitness for office was obvious well before 2024. He waited longer than any president in 100 years to hold his first news conference, and overall held by far the fewest press conferences of any president in modern history.

In 2021, Biden fell multiple times attempting to climb the steps of Air Force One. That same year he appeared to fall asleep during a climate summit and repeatedly appeared lost and confused during official events. 2022 and 2023 saw the president fall again during an Air Force Academy graduation ceremony, fall off his bike while standing completely still, and rack up an astonishing record of gaffes, misstatements, and incoherent ramblings.

Yet through all of this, Tapper himself was a reliable defender of Biden on CNN, repeatedly going to bat in defense of the president’s supposed mental sharpness. Journalist Tom Elliott compiled a damning supercut of Tapper’s participation in the cover-up of Biden’s deterioration over the years.

In October 2020, for instance, Tapper accused Trump campaign adviser Lara Trump of “mocking” Biden’s “stutter” for suggesting that Biden was “in a state of cognitive decline.” Four years later, Tapper was still dismissing Biden’s gaffes as merely a “stutter” and accusing Trump of “belittling” Biden for it. In 2022, Tapper claimed that Biden was “sharp mentally.” He further alleged that the narrative of Biden’s cognitive decline was a Russian ploy to undermine “election integrity.”

Thompson’s Axios, meanwhile, dutifully repeated the party line that Biden was a “healthy, vigorous, 80-year-old male, who is fit to successfully execute the duties of the Presidency.”

Various other clips and headlines of the media attempting to cover up the truth about Biden’s health are also now making the rounds online. Just two days before the first presidential debate last June, CNN published a story describing the notion that Biden was “a senile, mentally incapacitated elderly man” as a “conspiracy theory.”

Yet now, the same networks who attempted to gaslight the public for four years are shocked, stunned, flabbergasted at these supposedly new, never-before-known details about just how poor Biden’s health was.

This new narrative – that the corporate media was completely fooled and misled by the White House – creates two distinct possibilities, neither of which is particularly flattering for our supposed betters in the journalist class.

The first possibility (if we are to take Tapper and Thompson at their word) is that no one in the liberal media really had any clue about Biden’s cognitive decline.

This interpretation seems rather suspect from the get-go. Journalists have infinitely more access to the president than everyday Americans. They cover his every move for a living. So are we really supposed to believe that an overwhelming majority of Americans (and conservative news outlets) saw that Biden was too old to run for re-election, but no one in the liberal media could see it?

If that is indeed the case, then what good are those “journalists” in the first place? Why should any American believe anything that comes out of the mouth of someone who apparently can’t see what is right in front of their face and simply repeats whatever those in power tell them to say? A pundit who is only now “discovering” what most Americans have known for years isn’t much use to anyone.

The second and more likely possibility is that the media knew exactly what they were doing and repeatedly, knowingly, and consistently lied to the public anyway because it advanced their political agenda. Now that the lie has become impossible to maintain, they are scrambling to cover their own hides by pinning blame on Biden staffers.

Of course, the great irony here is that the lie was never all that believable. Most Americans knew they were being lied to.

Either way, the cover-up of Biden’s cognitive decline remains one of if not the single greatest media scandal in American history. Public confidence in the legacy press was collapsing before the fraud was exposed, and this is only likely to accelerate that trend.

Shane Harris is the Editor-in-Chief of AMAC Newsline. You can follow him on X @shaneharris513.