Pre-election, much of the media disregarded the Hunter Biden laptop story first published by the New York Post.
The reasoning, as journalist Glenn Greenwald noted on Thursday, was twofold: Some members of the media claimed the story was Russian disinformation while others doubted the authenticity of the documents. (RELATED: These Reports Are Essential Reading For Understanding The Hunter Biden Story)
These pushbacks came despite The Daily Caller News Foundation obtaining a full copy of Hunter’s alleged laptop in October and verifying the NY Post’s “smoking gun” email, which showed Hunter receiving correspondence from a Burisma executive about an introduction to then-Vice President Joe Biden in 2015.
Media outlets, to justify their refusal to report on the Hunter Biden/China documents before the election, disseminated two primary claims:
1) This was Russian disinformation and 2) the documents’ authenticity is in doubt.
Both of those claims were false. Anyway, moving on.
— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) December 10, 2020
Even after proving the email’s legitimacy, the fact that Hunter himself never denied the laptop was his and a lack of evidence indicating Russia’s involvement, the media remained largely silent. NPR called the news a distraction and declared that it wouldn’t waste readers time covering it, while Politico lauded a letter signed by over 50 former senior intelligence officials claiming the released emails had “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.”
The media’s censorship was helped along by Twitter, which blocked the spread of the story as well. For weeks, a concerted effort was made to squash the news as the election neared. (RELATED: Twitter Is Using Its ‘Hacked Info’ Policy To Suppress The NYPost Story, But There’s One Big Problem)
This week, the public learned that there is a federal investigation into Hunter Biden’s taxes, potential money laundering and his foreign ties, a report from Politico notes – and suddenly, the laptop story does not seem so far fetched for many news organizations.
“The Biden team has rejected some of the claims made in the Post articles, but has not disputed the authenticity of the files upon which they were based,” The New York Times reported in an article about the tax investigation on Wednesday.
Pre-election, as Greenwald noted, “there was a lot of information on the laptop about Hunter Biden’s exploitation of his father’s name to pursue dealings with this company which the probe is targeting, but Silicon Valley censored it & many were barred from reporting it.”
But now, with Biden slated to take office and an investigation into Hunter announced, the media no longer appears to be disregarding the NY Post’s laptop story, as it’s become clear that their reason for previously suppressing the news was wrong.
