While PBS can't even breathe the names "Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson" on the News Hour, NPR gave their book extensive time. First, there was 11 minutes in two segments with the two authors on Monday's All Things Considered. Then Tapper was interviewed for the hour on Tuesday on Fresh Air with Terry Gross.
The two parties came up in the questions. Gross said "Republicans, I think, are very happy with your book," and "Many Democrats are unhappy about your book."
Gross began with Biden's cancer news: "I'm really sorry, as I'm sure are you, to hear the news about Biden's prostate cancer. Does it make it awkward for you to criticize him now at this moment?" Tapper said "I want to be extra careful with how I talk about it because I don't want anyone to feel like I'm reveling in any of this. But the book was written, as you know, as a tragedy," and the cancer news is a tragedy.
Next, Gross asked, "Do you feel like you were misled or lied to?" Tapper replied "I do, but more important, what we uncovered in our reporting was that far more important people than me were misled and lied to. I mean, I'm just a journalist."
Then came the party talk:
GROSS: Republicans, I think, are very happy with your book. And James Comer, chair of the House Oversight Committee, is going to continue its investigation into a cover-up of Biden's mental decline and his use of the auto pen, which is like an automatic pen. And there's questions that Comer has about whether Biden had the mental capacity to sign bills, and also whether the auto pen is a legitimate way of signing them. He also says that those involved in the cover-up will begin to put on notice. Do you think that what you found in your book is worthy of a congressional investigation? Is that an appropriate response to what you found, in your opinion?
TAPPER: Well, I don't think James Comer has read the book, and we don't have anything in there on the auto pen.
GROSS: Right, and I think a lot of this comes from the Robert Hur audio.
TAPPER: Yeah. I think there are serious questions about his capacity to be president, and that's not questions raised by me. They're questions raised by people in his administration talking to us.
So it's kind of a Yes that congressional probes are appropriate. Gross left out the reaction of many Republicans that the reporters here are cashing in on belated revelations that they should have been covering while Biden was still president.
Then came Democrat reaction:
GROSS: Many Democrats are unhappy about your book, and this dates back to before the news of the past few days. A lot of Democrats feel like, why are you going back and talking about Biden and his problems? It distracts from putting the focus on how Trump is using or abusing his power. The Democrats want to put the past behind them and move forward. What's your response to that?
TAPPER: I mean, there are a lot of responses to that. First of all, you know, books like this get written all the time. When a presidential term is over, participants in the term are much more willing to speak than when it's going on.
Terry Gross is not in the habit of asking all of her liberal guests writing books about how the Republicans are semi-fascist crackpots about how Republicans are unhappy with their work. Because she doesn't care if they are.
To her credit, Gross played a damning snippet of Biden's interview with special counsel Robert Hur, and Tapper told her Team Biden wanted to edit out Hur's report that he came across as an elderly man with a poor memory. But Gross somehow felt compelled to end the interview by asking about Trump attacking the press and seeking to defund "public" broadcasting:
GROSS: So, you know, Trump was very opposed to the press during his first administration - enemy of the people. There's more lawsuits now and, you know, legal attacks against the media, funding attacks against public radio and television. I think it's designed to have a chilling effect. How do you fight against that?
TAPPER: Well, I mean, you described the terrain correctly. And the president has shown himself to be rather litigious, whether it's the lawsuit against George Stephanopoulos and ABC News that Disney settled to the tune of something like $16 million, or the lawsuit against Paramount for the "60 Minutes" edits of the Kamala Harris interview, a case that most legal experts say is entirely without merit but that one informed source told me they expected to settle for something between $30 million and $50 million. It's something to keep in mind, but that just means get your facts right.
I do not like what he's doing with NPR or PBS or the Corporation for Public Broadcasting or Voice of America or Radio Free Europe or any of them. I don't like it. We've had guests on to talk about it. I tried explaining to a Republican congressman how "Sesame Street," "Mister Rogers" and "The Electric Company" basically taught me how to read and write by Age 3. Those shows are so incredible. And I just saw that "Sesame Street's" coming to Netflix, which is great, although not something accessible to every American with a TV. So, I mean, it's disturbing, but I think we just have to keep doing our job, and most importantly just keep our head down, not get emotional, not take it personally, make sure that we report the facts.
You know, the news media is in a crisis. And I don't count you in this, Terry, because you are your own industry, and people revere you. But reporters in general - CNN, NPR, ABC, CBS, all of us - people don't trust us. One of the reasons they don't trust us is what just happened with Joe Biden and his acuity, and the fact that we in the media were pretty late to the story. Let me say we in the legacy media were late to that story because conservative media was not late to it. And I think that we really need to - we are in an existential fight, I think, for a free press, not that it's going to be taken away, but it certainly runs the risk of not thriving as it has. And that just calls on us to be as good and professional as possible.
Tapper's book underlines why Trump can call the press "fake news," when almost all of them spread the "Joe Biden's just fine" fakery for years.
