CNN’s Jake Tapper is seeing a worse decline in viewership for his show than the rest of the struggling network’s premier shows, and even worse than the show of one of the main figures accused of helping to cover up President Biden’s decline, MSNBC’s Jen Psaki. Mr. Tapper has faced harsh criticism from the left and the right surrounding the release of his new book, co-written with Axios’s Alex Thompson, “Original Sin,” about efforts to cover up Mr. Biden’s cognitive and physical decline. While his book made the explosive claim of exposing a systematic effort to cover up Mr. Biden’s condition, his viewership appears to be taking more of a beating than that of one of his competitors, Ms. Psaki, who conservatives have long accused of participating in the alleged cover-up. In May, the month “Original Sin” was released, CNN saw its primetime ratings drop 18 percent from April, and its total day viewership drop 14 percent. Compared to May 2024, CNN was down 18 percent in the primetime hours and 25 percent total day, according to Nielsen data. While the network’s premier programming saw a double-digit decrease, Mr. Tapper’s viewership took a bigger hit, losing a quarter of its audience compared to May 2024. Last month, the controversial host averaged 525,000 total viewers, down 25 percent from last year and his worst month since April 2015. That number also represents a nearly 21 percent decrease from the 662,000 total viewers Mr. Tapper averaged during the first quarter of 2025. Conservatives have accused the CNN host of hypocrisy for writing about Mr. Biden’s physical and cognitive state only after he left office and following years of the host declining to press the White House on questions about the president’s age in real time. Meanwhile, left-wing commentators have suggested Mr. Tapper “betrayed” his audience to try to appeal to more conservatives with his book. CNN insists that Nielsen’s ratings do not capture the “true reach” of Mr. Tapper’s show.“The award-winning program ‘The Lead with Jake Tapper’ reaches broad global audiences across CNN, CNN International, and Max’s streaming platform. No single metric can capture the true reach and impact of a program driving the national conversation,” a CNN representative said in a statement. While Mr. Tapper now says he has “humility” about how he covered questions about the president’s age while Mr. Biden was in the White House and is now seeking to share the truth of the situation, he appears to be paying a larger price than one of the figures who has long been accused of covering up the president’s condition. Ms. Psaki served as Mr. Biden’s White House press secretary until 2022 and now hosts the 9 p.m. hour on MSNBC Tuesday through Friday. Her debut night on May 6 brought in just 1.2 million viewers. Since then, her viewership has shrunk; her audience routinely fails to cross the 1 million mark, and she has averaged 973,000 total viewers.That represents a 20 percent decrease from May 2024, when Alex Wagner hosted MSNBC’s 9 p.m. hour Tuesday through Friday. Ms. Psaki has repeatedly insisted that during her time in the White House, she never saw the version of Mr. Biden that horrified millions of Americans during his June 2024 debate with Mr. Trump. In an interview with NPR’s media correspondent, David Folkenflik, after “Original Sin” was released, Ms. Psaki said, “I spent time with [Mr. Biden] every day, and I’d never seen the person who was on that debate stage.”“Now, aging happens quickly. Did it happen aggressively in the year before, the six months before, the four months before? I don’t know the answer to that question,” she added. Although Ms. Psaki suggests Mr. Biden’s decline only happened after she left the White House, Mr. Tapper’s new book includes several moments where aides and allies of the president expressed concern about his health as early as his 2020 campaign. Conservatives were also raising concerns about his mental acuity at the time. Mr. Folkenflik said that “researchers at the Internet Archive reviewed the episodes on Psaki’s new show” and found that she “hasn’t brought that insider’s insight to her viewers on Biden’s health or mental acuity.”He also said the former Biden press secretary declined to offer any “additional comment” on Mr. Tapper’s book but has “instead been focusing attention on Trump and the threat she says he poses.”
