National Public Radio’s Fresh Air interview program, hosted by Terry Gross, brought on journalist Chris Whipple Tuesday to talk about his new book on former President Biden and how Biden’s handlers concealed his mental decline from the public -- and themselves? And what role if any did NPR play?

Over the course of Biden’s single term, NPR treated the matter of Biden’s mounting mental decrepitude gingerly, often balancing things out for its liberal listenership by including trolling concern for Donald Trump’s own mental acuity (an accusation you don’t hear anymore considering Trump’s vigorous whirlwind of activity).

After Robert Hur's February 2024 special counsel report on Biden’s handling of classified documents said Biden came off as a "well-meaning elderly man with a poor memory," there were a few relatively thorough stories, but also some ridiculously fawning ones in defense of Biden’s mental aptitude. In one, NPR political analyst Ron Elving promised "any kind of dissing of old folks is a risky strategy and likely to backfire."

Naturally, Gross never brought up the mainstream media’s shameful cover-up of Biden’s decline, or questioned the passive coverage of her own outlet, National Public Radio.

TERRY GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. I am Terry Gross. Democrats are still asking questions like, why didn't Joe Biden end his reelection campaign sooner? Why did he even run for reelection, knowing that he would have been 82 when he started his second term and 86 when it ended? Why didn't his staff tell him he wasn't up to the job? How did Kamala Harris lose to Trump after Trump tried to overturn the results of the 2020 election and was convicted of 34 felonies?

My guest, Chris Whipple, explores these questions from different perspectives in his new book, Uncharted: How Trump Beat Biden, Harris, And The Odds In The Wildest Campaign In History. Whipple's previous book was about the first two years of the Biden presidency…. Biden's chief of staff during the first two years of his presidency, Ron Klain, was a major source for the new book about the 2024 election….

(Whipple’s previous flattering book on President Biden, The Fight Of His Life, garnered the author an interview on NPR’s Morning Edition in January 2023, after classified documents were found in the then-president’s personal residence. Whipple insisted Biden’s scandal was “not even remotely comparable to Trump's shameless” classified document scandal, and that Biden’s handling of documents didn’t even rise to the “scandal” level, but was merely a “kerfuffle.”)

On Tuesday, Whipple insisted Biden’s inner circle “were operating in a kind of fog of delusion and denial” about Biden, not actively concealing his mental decline to carry him over the second-term finish line. Then he obliquely raised the media angle.

WHIPPLE: Well, you know, I had my own reasons for wondering if the Biden White House staff was hiding the president because when I was writing my book on the first two years of the administration, I asked for an interview with the president. I was told I could email questions and I would get written answers in reply. You know, clearly, they were uncomfortable even then with the prospect of the president having an interview in real time with a reporter.

Sounds like a great story for an NPR reporter, or any reporter, to have broken before Biden withdrew from the 2024 campaign.

Whipple defended his source, Biden’s chief of staff Ron Klain.

GROSS: ….[Klain] saw up close what Biden's condition was. So how do you explain that?

WHIPPLE: ….I am convinced that Joe Biden's inner circle was convinced that Joe Biden was capable of governing, and they believed that he could do it for another four years.”

In his previous book, Whipple fawned over Biden’s “parsing the details of a complex multination prisoner swap” and concluded “you can't dismiss the fact -- it's an inconvenient fact for people who say it was a cover-up -- that Biden was capable.”