CNN anchor Jake Tapper and Axios reporter Alex Thompson are set to embark on a promotional tour in support of their new exposé examining former President Joe Biden’s cognitive decline and the effort to conceal it from the public during the 2024 election campaign.

A debate has been revived over how much complicity the media had in the alleged cover-up in advance of the release of the book, titled Original Sin, in May.

Its publisher, Penguin Press, is releasing a new promo demonstrating that Tapper and Thompson were not among those who denied Biden’s sharpness. The video is a montage showing numerous examples in which the co-authors spoke about the then-president’s declining mental acuity.

The two-minute video serves to shore up both Tapper and Thompson’s journalistic bona fides and shut down salvos that have already started emerging from conservative media accusing any and all journalists who covered the Biden White House of being in the tank for him.

It is worth recalling that during the campaign, Tapper earned praise from then-candidate Donald Trump and Fox News hosts for how he co-moderated the first 2024 debate — the one that was so disastrous for Biden it led to his withdrawal from the race.

And Thompson rose to national prominence thanks to his tough coverage of the Biden White House. He earned bipartisan plaudits for his White House Correspondents’ Dinner speech in which he criticized the press — and even pointed the finger at himself — for not doing a better job uncovering Biden’s clear decline at the end of his presidency.

The video opens with a clip of Tapper pressing Biden in September of 2020 on his health and acumen. “Will you pledge that if you’re elected, you will be transparent about your health, all facets of your health with urgency so that we know?” the CNN anchor asked. (The most stunning aspect of the video might be just how much sharper and younger Biden looked at that time.)

What follows is a series of clips showing Tapper and Thompson saying things like: “Two-thirds of the American people say he’s not sharp enough to be president”; “How can you use the bully pulpit when you don’t have a bully you can put in the pulpit?”; flatly talking about White House “denialism” surrounding Biden’s inability to communicate effectively.

It concludes with the following:

In the name of defeating what they called an existential threat to democracy, Biden and his inner circle ensured it, denying the existence of health issues the nation had been watching for years, dooming the Democrats to defeat.

Now the full, unsettling truth is being told for the first time.

It is true that conservative media, namely Fox News, covered Biden’s age far more aggressively than other outlets. Sean Hannity notoriously referred to Biden as “Sippy Cup” until Trump told him to stop that because it was unkind. But even Fox News lauded Tapper for asking tough questions of Democrats about Biden’s mental ability on multiple occasions.

Biden’s age and mental sharpness were major issues throughout the 2020 campaign, but the extent of his decline wasn’t apparent to many until late in his presidency. He looked notably younger and sharper during his speech announcing his run for re-election in September 2022.

Soon after, however, his public appearances and press availability went from very few to almost none. How his White House and campaign sought to shield him from public scrutiny is the original sin Tapper and Thompson tackle in their book.

Watch above via Penguin Press.