Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson’s book on the cover-up of Joe Biden’s mental decline has been heavily promoted by its publisher, Penguin Random House, as well as CNN. The network believed that Tapper’s book would sell at least as well as Bob Woodward’s “Fear: Trump in the White House,” which sold more than a million copies in the first week.
CNN was hoping the book would supercharge ratings for Tapper’s show, “The Lead,” and revive the network’s fortunes. Alas, it was not to be.
Revelations in the Tapper-Thompson book have been part of the wall-to-wall coverage of its release. In fact, it seems that the revelations have been so extensively covered that people may think they don’t need to read the book because they’ve already heard all the juicy bits.
Whatever. The book sold about 50,000 copies in the first week.
“That’s about 1/10th of the people who watch Tapper’s nightly show,” observes Showbiz411 reporter Roger Friedman. In addition to Tapper’s book sales being in the toilet, his TV show’s ratings are the worst since 2016.
“‘The Lead with Jake Tapper’ averaged 525,000 total viewers from April 28 through May 25, shedding 25% of CNN’s audience in its timeslot from the same period last year in the process,” reports Fox News.
“By comparison, Fox News offerings ‘The Five’ and ‘Special Report with Bret Baier’ averaged 3.3 million viewers from April 28 through May 25, trouncing Tapper,” the network said.
Friedman gives one possible explanation for the anemic book sales.
I’m more unhappy about Tapper lying all year about writing a stealth book about a subject he was covering in real time. It’s totally unprofessional. He would only have been rooting for Biden to look bad in the famous debate last June, as well as all other times. It was to his advantage.
CNN should be embarrassed but they won’t be. They are so desperate for ratings they are now featuring interviews with fringe witnesses in the Diddy trial. But the Tapper experience has been a bust. It wasn’t worth it.
On the other hand, Hot Air’s David Strom believes the difference between Woodward’s Trump book selling a million copies the first week and Tapper’s Biden book selling 50,000 was simple: Donald Trump.
Showbiz 411 seems to think that Tapper is getting punished for being too mean to poor Joe Biden, but I think the answers are much simpler than that: people don’t want to think about Joe Biden anymore, and people are pretty disgusted with Jake Tapper’s dancing around the fact that he was part of the conspiracy to cover up Joe Biden’s incapacity.
I had assumed that Tapper’s book would be closer to the Bob Woodward success than the countless books on the remainder pile. A Bob Woodward book can sell over a million copies, and people even shelled out to read Hillary Clinton’s take on the 2016 election (shudder!). Both of those books, though, prominently featured Donald Trump, and people want to read about him.
That rings far truer than the notion that people were upset that Tapper was covering Biden while writing about him. It was a breach of ethics, as Friedman points out, but if the last decade has taught us anything, it’s that if you slap Trump’s name on anything, it flies off the shelves. From coffee cups to fanny packs to books, the public can’t get enough of Donald Trump.
On the other hand, people would rather not read about a president they are trying desperately to forget.
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