There's a growing desperation in the media to claim it wasn't part of the cover-up of Biden's health decline. With all the books released, journalists are holding very somber-sounding panels to discuss how the Biden family is bad, and poor journalists were lied to for four years (or longer). It's something that doesn't pass the smell test.

Jeffrey Goldberg, Editor in Chief of The Atlantic, leads this charge. In a discussion with "Original Sin" authors Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson, Goldberg defended how the press covered Biden. He threw up his hands and said they had no evidence.

Goldberg stated, "One of the interesting subjects here that's come out in the past week, as you guys are talking about the book, is the role of the media. ... I don't understand how this narrative has developed that no one in the — that the media was covering for Biden. I think what might be going on here is a lack of understanding about how reporting works. In order to prove that he's diminished, you have to have people, sources inside telling you this."

I did a cursory look at The Atlantic's website and noted that the last time any hits for their site to cover the "25th Amendment" was 2022. And before that, it was a common topic to cover during the Trump years. The Atlantic even covered the stark-mad ravings of a psychiatrist who tried to get Democrats to have Trump "involuntarily committed" during his first term.

Goldberg's formulation that he needed someone to say, "Joe is diminished," contradicts everything they did in the Trump years. For any Republican president, the press assumes that the administration is lying. The Atlantic is no different from any other mainstream outlet that complains about Trump lying. They questioned nothing from Biden.

At no point did The Atlantic, CNN, or any other mainstream outlet reset their coverage to match what Americans of all political beliefs thought: Joe Biden was declining.

Before the infamous debate between Trump and Biden, The New York Times polled Americans on the race, with Trump leading the race by four points. In their poll, again this is pre-debate, they found that 68% of Americans agreed with the statement "Joe Biden is just too old to be an effective president."

If you asked Republicans that same question, that number skyrocketed to 81%, with independents not far behind, with 74% saying the same thing. Shockingly, 48% of Democrats believed the same thing, with only 51% disagreeing. Only 23% of Democrats strongly disagreed with that assertion.

If you dug further into the numbers, of those who said age was an issue, 44% agreed with the statement "Joe Biden's age is such a problem that he is not capable of handling the job of president." That was the majority position for those who held a view on Biden's age and health.

The number of Americans who looked at Biden and said, "There is something wrong with him right now," was the majority view. Americans didn't need Jeffrey Goldberg's confirmation from the White House that something was wrong; they knew something was off, told pollsters the same, and voted like that in November.

The question for journalists is fundamental: why did you not reflect the majority position of Americans, including a near-majority of Democrats, on this one essential issue?

Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson are running around doing interviews about a book in which they claim five people ran the White House, and Biden was not one of them. The book contains passages that show a man utterly incapable of interacting with the world around him.

Americans saw that. Even Democrats saw that and had deep concerns. "Original Sin" has multiple instances of Democratic officials or donors going up to White House officials demanding an explanation for what was wrong with Biden during his entire presidency!

If there ever was an instance for the 25th Amendment, the Biden administration was it. The cover-up didn't work on the American people. You average American looked at Biden and made the rational conclusion - and that included Democrats.

Journalists had to rationalize their way to something different to avoid those same conclusions. In one of the funnier moments in this press tour, Jake Tapper goes on MSNBC's "Morning Joe." He tells Scarborough and the rest that they were a heavy focus of the White House's cover-up attempt.

But that's only partially true. Jake Tapper had to publicly admit he apologized to Lara Trump for blasting her for pointing out Biden's decline. Tapper was in the same boat as any of the MSNBC hosts.

The press made a systemic effort to suppress Biden's decline. The White House got what it needed: journalists willing to repeat whatever the White House said with little push-back. The press believed every bit of that cover-up because they wanted to believe it.

Meanwhile, actual Americans didn't buy it for a second. If the press treated the Biden family like they treated Trump, we wouldn't be listening to apology sessions and somber panels on whether the press messed up. Someone would have broken a story on Biden and sunk his presidency with the most obvious story of the century. A Pulitzer was waiting to be won.

But the press did the same thing Democrats who believed the cover-up did: they fell back on "Orange man is bad." They excused bad reporting then and don't want the mea culpa now. Zero lessons have been learned.