The Lead with Jake Tapper

Jake Tapper isn't bad. But he's not particularly remarkable, either. It doesn't help that Jim Sciutto is his weird stunt double, kind of like Trump to Boris Johnson. If you tune in in the morning and then not back until the afternoon, you'd think the same potato-faced guy had been on all day.

Look, I know gone are the days of the Walter Cronkites, the David Brinkleys, the Hugh Downs, and the Ted Koppels. I get it. Gen-X and late Boomers are in charge, so we get what we get, but even their mistaking the mundane for the profound has occasional glimpses of brilliance.

Tapper has the air of somebody's nephew who decided not to go into the family's, I don't know, window business and instead hit up some powerful aunt or uncle in the biz.

Ugh, and then the correspondents. From Manu Raju's rushed, wordy, inflectionless speech and head bobbing to Dana Bash's leaden staccato to John King's near-ventriloquist act mumbling to Jamie Gangel's glacial self importance -- it's a real slog.

It may sound like I'm being harsh to Tapper. It's not him. It's his effect, which to some degree he has control over. Right now, he's as dull as Wolf Blitzer, just without the Papa Smurf demeanor. I know when CNN lost Cuomo they had to shuffle the deck, but there were problems before, like when they lost Brooke Baldwin who was smart and amiable.