On Wednesday the full effect of Jake Tapper’s attack on Joe Biden was unleashed on CNN.
The network began shilling hourly for Tapper’s book, “Original Sin” at that point. The top anecdotes that made the rounds were about Biden’s aides suggested he needed a wheelchair (which was preposterous), and that he didn’t recognize George Clooney in May 2024 at a fundraiser.
The result for Tapper is that the book is number 3 right now on Amazon. Pub date is Tuesday.
Online, Tapper and his co-author Alex Thompson are being railed against so fiercely that they’ve hired a PR crisis consultant to stop the bad vibes.
On TV, the grinding of Biden has not helped Tapper. In total viewers, his show “The Lead,” gets less than half the viewership of MSNBC’s competing shows hosted by Nicolle Wallace and Ari Melber.
On Wednesday, Wallace had 985,000 viewers, Melber had 893,000.
At the same time, Tapper had 515,000 and then 470,000.
Thursday was about the same.
The one place where Tapper wins is in the 25 to 49 age group, where he remains even or a little higher than the Wallace/Melber combo.
It remains to be seen if the fury unleashed on “Original Sin” will harm its sales after the first flush this coming week. Social media opinion is that Tapper and all of CNN should be focusing on Trump’s trip abroad (the Qatari plane, etc) and not attacking Biden, who came out of retirement to save us in 2020 and is considered one of the best presidents of all time by historians.
