It remains one of the glaring low points of our journalism complex: the collective press's avoidance of the harsh truth of Joe Biden’s mental decline. A keepsake of that misbegotten era is “Original Sin”, the book authored by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson, which strained to recalibrate events and claimed the press had been misled by the Biden administration on the deteriorating condition of the president.
Well, it appears Mr. Thompson is back to his revisionist skill set, as he comes out with a report that catalogs the many problems and scandalous developments that have brought Democrat senatorial hopeful Graham Platner to the precipice of political demise. Thompson delivers several…well, not revelations…as his list of disqualifying traits about the man has long been revealed.
What he presents are the items that the loudest outlets in the news industry either chose not to cover, or worse, told us were completely acceptable character aspects of Der Oysterführer. That Thompson postures as if he has BREAKING news here is downright hilarious.
Many Dems blame Platner's team — particularly his political advisers at the media consulting firm Fight Agency — for not revealing or pushing to find out the extent of his baggage while continuing to rake in money over the past year.
— Alex Thompson (@AlexThomp) July 8, 2026
There were q’s in 2025. pic.twitter.com/5z5fuTYEuA
A question: If there were questions about the man last year, why were they not asked and answered by the likes of you until now? Pretty much since that time, Platner was shown to have more skeletons stored away than a slaughterhouse, but the media were largely incurious about it all. The bulk of the “reporting” on the man was in telling us how these issues were inconsequential.
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Here is the best way to show how incurious the media had been. As I covered back in May, while Platner and his team (namely, the press) were desperate to explain away his Nazi tattoo and whether or not it indicated antisemitic tendencies, the brilliant politician sat in on a podcast with a noted supremacist. Then after that, his team had to rush to scrub his lending support for a Nazi sympathizer on his social media account.
Again, this occurred AFTER there was loud major blowback about having a death camp tattoo emblazoned over his heart. The press could not have been more uninterested in these connect-the-dots examples, and today we have Mr. Thompson coming in with his “Huh, well what do you know?!” style of reporting.
The cracks were there:
— Alex Thompson (@AlexThomp) July 8, 2026
Platner and his team billed him as an oyster farmer — a title most of the media, including Axios at times, repeated without scrutiny.
But as early as August he was telling ppl it wasn’t actually how he made a living and makes little $ from it
Making this sound revelatory today is mystifying. Yes, Alex — the “cracks” (fissures) were there, but they went underreported and were deemphasized. Platner’s dubious farming skills were detailed months prior by the Free Beacon. It was treated as a partisan hit rather than valid biographical inaccuracies.
But all of these “discoveries” by Thompson are treated as new information, and the lack of broader recognition is never attributed to journalistic sloth and running cover for the party. It is addressed as a Democrat Party obfuscation, as if the press were powerless to ferret out the details, which had been made public by undesirable sources such as our own.
There are parallels to 2024, when Democrats sleepwalked into disaster by publicly attesting to Joe Biden's fitness as president despite private doubts.
Ummm…Alex??? Pretending the press has no culpability in allowing this “disaster” to play out is simply lame and pathetic. If your ilk had done their jobs, this would all have been avoided soon after Platner declared his candidacy. Instead, most were content to follow the DNC playbook and tried to tell us the guy with a death camp tattoo and a history as unsettling as a fault line was completely valid for a Senate seat.
As someone who would rather not curse their darkness, but instead light a candle to help the cause of the press, I humbly make a suggestion: Maybe news outlets could avoid these scenarios if they focused a little less on petulant issues, such as algae in the reflecting pool, and used their assets and energy to report on news that is actually vital, ya think?
Thompson touches on one aspect of things that led to this Platner fallout, but as expected, he stops short of shining a light on the mirror. The following passage is actually accurate, but incomplete.
Platner's rise and fall shows a key way President Trump has changed Democratic politics. If it means diminishing his power, Democrats are willing to surrender or temporarily ignore their own stated values.
One thing Thompson seems unwilling to admit: The news industry has also been willing to surrender its own ethics for the same cause of bringing down Trump. All the proof needed is to look at the way they promoted this rapey Nazi with anger issues and a completely fabricated curriculum vitae.
The Platner debacle is proving once again a haunting characteristic in the media: This crowd that claims to be the arbiters of truth is completely unwilling to be honest with themselves.
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