Here's NPR's headline on Friday's Biden news: "Biden ghostwriter tapes to be released." Released by whom? The wind, apparently. The tapes woke up Friday morning and decided it was time. * Quick background, one breath: the tapes are Joe Biden's 2017 sit-downs with his memoir ghostwriter, scooped up during special counsel Robert Hur's classified-documents probe. On Friday, Biden stopped fighting in court — so the audio now goes to the Heritage Foundation, the conservative think tank that sued to get it. * Fox headlined the same saga earlier in the week like a heist movie: "Biden's fight to keep Hur interview tapes under wraps suffers fresh court blow." Look at that grammar. Biden is the guy clutching the box. The tapes are "under wraps." The court delivers "blows." Subject, verb, villain — Fox picked all three by the second word. * NPR picked none. And the funny part is that NPR's own article is crawling with actors: Trump's Justice Department "reversed course" in May after spending two years arguing the tapes were like "entries in a personal diary." A think tank sued. Two courts said no. Biden folded. Every verb in the body has a subject. The only sentence where things just mysteriously happen on their own is the headline. * NPR also had the most quietly chilling quote of the week — and parked it way down the page. Jeffrey Clark, one of the Trump allies on the winning side, on what happens to a former president's private book interviews now: "We'll put out a link. It's not more complicated than that." That's the whole new era of your government handing your recordings to your opponents, delivered in the tone of someone sharing a Spotify playlist. * Credit where due: NPR's body reporting is the fullest version anywhere — Hur's "sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory" line, a source describing the tapes as "painfully boring," Biden's camp calling the release a "dangerous" precedent. The reporting points at everyone. The headline points at nobody. * That's what passive voice is for, in the end. This story embarrasses everyone at once — a DOJ that broke its own rule, a former president who lost, a think tank about to drop a link. "To be released" spreads the blame so thin that no one has to wear it. Fox at least gave the sentence a subject. We'd argue with the casting, but at least somebody's in the frame.