May 14, 2025

Greetings from Los Angeles and welcome back to In the Room. In tonight’s issue, fresh reporting on Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson’s Original Sin, and a years-long beef between Tapper and Hunter Biden that underlines the extremely tortured nature of Bidenworld’s crisis-control effort. 🍸 On the latest edition of The Grill Room, Julia Alexander and I explored the key themes emerging from this week’s upfronts in New York, from NBC’s live sports strategy to WBD’s expected decision to spin off its decaying linear assets. Plus, some thoughts on Fox News’s status as the lone thriving cable news business, and the NBA’s position in the next media era. Follow The Grill Room on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you prefer to listen. Mentioned in this issue: Bob Iger, David Zaslav, Jeff Bezos, Jimmy Pitaro, Mark Thompson, Will Lewis, John Harris, Jake Tapper, Joel Embid, George Clooney, Chris Meagher, Scott Galloway, and many, many more… Let’s get started…

WBD, Worst Board of Directors: Warner Bros. Discovery chief David Zaslav announced this week that the Max streaming service will once again be called HBO Max, reversing his initial, misguided decision to strip the brand of the three most prestigious letters in television. At the same time, his direct report Mark Thompson previewed a new CNN streaming service that will allow subscribers to watch the linear feed in the app, which called to mind part of the old plan for CNN+. The whiplash here is stupefying. But the real mystery is why the board—which Scott Galloway has now dubbed the “worst board in media”—continues to furnish Zaz with roughly $50 million in annual comp even as WBD’s stock has dropped more than 60 percent since it started trading in April 2022. Anyway, it hardly matters anymore. After three years of brand deterioration, Zaz is finally ready to spin out his cable networks and put CNN on the road to a smaller and shittier future with a Cox or a Tegna. In the meantime, Thompson’s latest bright idea is the creation of a CNN Weather app. Good luck.

ESPN’s Hail Mary: On a brighter note, Jimmy Pitaro has formally unveiled the new ESPN—the all-inclusive, $30-a-month streaming service that his boss Bob Iger recently described as the sports network’s biggest move since acquiring NFL rights nearly 40 years ago. It’s not necessarily hyperbole. ESPN and its sister channels are the cornerstone of the cable business, of course, so the potential cannibalization of their own linear product could hasten cable’s decline. More notably, the new ESPN will also test whether or not any cable channel can navigate the linear-to-streaming transition and come within spitting distance of the record profits of the peak cable era. Obviously, the Versant and future WBD spinco networks won’t. But maybe ESPN can.

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Will o’ the Wisp: Jeff Bezos’s stewardship of The Washington Post is the subject of a new New Yorker piece by Clare Malone, which mostly rehashes the paper’s very familiar recent history, while peppering in some Beltway gossip about the private life of its controversial publisher and C.E.O., Will Lewis. Specifically, Malone notes Will’s reputation for heavy drinking, and quotes a former Postie who says this has damaged his reputation with staff. She also notes, rightly, that he is conspicuously absent from many Post and D.C. social functions that previous publishers would have attended (“a state of hiding,” per Malone’s sources). Depending on whom you ask, this is either a red flag, or merely a sign of Will’s contempt for the D.C. crowd. (One anecdote suggests Will skipped a screening for the new Kay Graham documentary after perusing the guest list—a charge Will denies.)In any event, the most apt description of Will probably comes from a longtime associate who describes him as “a ‘wide boy’—British slang for someone who survives by his wits, often on the wrong side of right.” Does Jeff care about all this scrutiny? Maybe not. But I bet he’d rather have a leader of the Post who didn’t have this rep, and who was confident enough to show up and shake some hands, even if everyone in town hates his guts.

Politico’s Dasha Playbook: Finally, Politico announced this week that its new White House bureau chief, Dasha Burns, will also become the chief correspondent for the flagship Playbook franchise. Officially, Dasha’s “deeply sourced reporting” will supplement lead Playbook author Jack Blanchard’s “sharp editorial voice,” but there’s undoubtedly more to it. While Politico chief John Harris may adore Blanchard’s English wit, his lack of expertise in the machinations of official Washington is surely costing the business. In truth, Playbook is a B2B product that only succeeds if it holds sway with key opinion-formers on Capitol Hill and K Street. In time, they’ll either have to give the business to Dasha or face further attrition. Will Dasha be a better steward of the product? Ask me in six months…

And now, the main event…

The Hunter Biden-Tapper Face-Off

Joe Biden’s cognitive decline, Bidenworld’s cover-up, and the dire consequences for the Democratic Party, as reported in ‘Original Sin,’ have stirred up the Beltway blame game and dragged the former president out for a sad redemption tour, while raising the question of what exactly went down between Jake Tapper and Hunter Biden at Super Bowl LII.

Dylan Byers

On Tuesday, Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson, the co-authors of Original Sin, the heavily hyped book about President Biden’s cognitive decline and how it was allegedly covered up, launched the opening salvo of their promotional blitz via an excerpt in The New Yorker. The piece was a scathing indictment of Biden’s decision to run for reelection despite his condition, and then drag his feet on withdrawing from the race, even after his infamously disastrous debate performance. There was David Plouffe, the former Obama campaign manager and Harris advisor, stating on the record that Biden had “screwed” and “fucked” the Democrats. There was another Democratic strategist accusing Biden of stealing an election “from the American people.” And there was George Clooney, gutted by Biden’s feebleness and his failure to even recognize him at a Hollywood fundraiser, asserting that the Democrats’ attempt to deceive the country about Biden’s acuity was “how Trump won.” Also on Tuesday, an addition excerpt published by Axios, where Thompson serves as national political correspondent, revealed that Biden’s advisors had discussed letting the president use a wheelchair after reelection—but only after reelection, so as to avoid the “politically untenable” optics. The New York Times review described Original Sin as “a damning portrait of an enfeebled president” protected and enabled by his family and handlers. In an appearance that day on CNN, Tapper excoriated the White House for “lying”—“not only to the press, not only to the public, but … to members of their own cabinet … to White House staffers … to Democratic members of Congress.” And this is merely the beginning; the book itself doesn’t hit shelves for another week, at which point the inevitable deluge of podcast appearances will begin. In the still-early days of Trump 2.0, Original Sin has become a catalyst for some cathartic scapegoating among Democrats. If Biden “fucked” the party, as Plouffe and Tapper and Thompson posit, then the Democrats’ failure to defeat Trump can be attributed to the pride and vanity of one geriatric man and his enablers rather than a structural failure of the party to prevent the reelection of a convicted felon who blatantly disregards truth, law, and civility. In this self-serving narrative, the Democrats can move toward the midterms having cast off the Biden albatross, Kamala can pursue a gubernatorial bid without the humiliating stain of defeat, and the media itself can blame their mostly tepid coverage of Biden’s acuity on a well-hidden White House conspiracy. Meanwhile, those who did sound some semblance of alarm, Tapper and Thompson included, can take a self-satisfied victory lap. Needless to say, Biden and his loyalists take a different view. With help from former deputy press secretary Chris Meagher, the Biden team has launched a woefully misguided campaign to win back the narrative by denying Biden’s mental decline. This began with a soft BBC interview and continued with a humiliating appearance on The View that only bolstered the co-authors’ thesis and, presumably, their book sales. In response to the New Yorker excerpt, the Biden team shifted its defense to a focus on performance: “No one has been able to point out where Joe Biden had to make a presidential decision or make a presidential address where he was unable to do his job because of mental decline.” (I have not yet read Original Sin, though I have reason to believe the book may provide such evidence.)

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Biden, who served his party mostly admirably for 50 years and remains the only political candidate who has so far defeated Trump, undoubtedly looks at his fellow Democrats and feels a level of betrayal and injustice most mere mortals can’t even countenance. Nevertheless, his refusal to leave the bar when everyone is telling him to go home is difficult to watch.

The Tapper Beef

Why does Bidenworld continue to fight a battle it is so obviously poised to lose? Pride, of course, and perhaps the belief that one should never take a punch sitting down. For certain members of Biden’s family, however, there seems to be added indignity in the fact that the final chapter of the former president’s legacy is being co-written by Tapper, specifically. Indeed, there’s some notable history here. In February 2018, both Tapper and then-Vice President Biden and his son Hunter found themselves at U.S. Bank Stadium in Minneapolis for Super Bowl LII. Both Tapper and the Bidens are lifelong Philadelphia Eagles fans—the Eagles would beat the Patriots that day, 41 to 33—and both had been invited to a pregame party at the stadium with various Philly-adjacent notables, including Joel Embid, Danny DeVito, and Rob McElhenney and Kaitlin Olson. Upon entering the room, Tapper said hello to the former vice president, as well as former Rep. Kevin McCarthy, before going over to shake hands with Hunter. There are contrasting, almost Rashomon-like accounts of what happened next. But what is certain, according to three sources present in the room, is that Hunter put his arm around Tapper’s shoulders and told him that, if the two men were not in a public setting, “I would knock you out.” By most accounts, Hunter appeared to believe that Tapper had reported on allegations of his adultery and drug use, stemming from an acrimonious divorce with his ex-wife Kathleen Buhle the previous year. With hands raised, these sources said, Tapper sought to assure Hunter that he had done no such reporting—and, indeed, he hadn’t. Two sources in Bidenworld attribute Hunter’s anger that day to something else entirely: an alleged phone call between him and Tapper that took place around the time of his brother Beau Biden’s death three years previously, in which Tapper allegedly called repeatedly from an unknown number and then asked Hunter to notify him when Beau died. According to these sources, Hunter was so irate at Tapper that he told him to “fuck off,” and, according to one source, continued to express his anger to family members for a week following his brother’s death. Notably, neither source agreed to level this charge on the record. Tapper did go on the record, however, and called the insinuation “a patently false lie. At no point in my life have I ever called Hunter Biden—I’ve never even had his phone number—and I would never have contacted a person’s immediate family during such a challenging and personal time.” Presumably, if Hunter remembers that differently, he can say so on the record. In any event, Tapper did confirm the Super Bowl run-in: “Hunter did once confront me at a Super Bowl party, but it was over an unrelated issue—coverage he wrongly believed I had done regarding divorce allegations of drug use and using prostitutes, which I actually had never done.” I surmise this isn’t the last these two have seen of each other.

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