RCI's Hunter Biden Reader: The Media

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The news of the Hunter Biden investigation is hardly a smoking gun. It certainly doesn’t point to a massive conspiracy carried out by the mainstream media to elevate the Democratic presidential candidate. Rather, it is being used to launder a dubious right-wing smear campaign and hamper the incoming Biden administration. Far from being an example of the clear-eyed wisdom of conservative outlets, the Hunter Biden story shows how these media organizations use the appearance of journalism to push political attacks.

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President Donald Trump’s eleventh-hour efforts to impart a stain of criminality onto President-elect Joe Biden through a series of vague, circuitous and often false allegations, did little but inflame his committed supporters. And the months-long investigations by his Republican allies in the Senate failed to gain traction outside of the Trumpworld echo chamber as Trump hurtled toward an Election Day defeat. Now, Trump is facing his own mounting scandals that are likely to dog him post-presidency.

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Regarding NPR's decision not to report on the New York Post's reportage on Hunter Biden's laptop in October 2020: “We don't want to waste our time on stories that are not really stories, and we don't want to waste the listeners’ and readers’ time on stories that are just pure distractions,” NPR Managing Editor for News Terence Samuel told [McBride]. “And quite frankly, that's where we ended up, this was … a politically driven event and we decided to treat it that way.”

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This week, the New York Post published a story based on what it says are emails — "smoking gun" emails, it calls them — sent by a Ukrainian business executive to the son of Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden. The story fits snugly into a narrative from President Trump and his allies that Hunter Biden's zealous pursuit of business ties abroad also compromised the former vice president. Yet this was a story marked more by red flags than investigative rigor.

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An election-year investigation by Senate Republicans asserted that Hunter Biden traded off his father’s name to close lucrative business deals around the world, and that his work for Burisma Holdings, a corrupt Ukrainian energy company while the former vice president was directing American policy toward Kyiv gave the appearance of a conflict of interest and alarmed some in the State Department. But the 87-page document released on Wednesday by the Senate Homeland Security Committee contained no evidence that the former vice president improperly manipulated American policy toward Ukraine or committed any other misdeed.

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Not since the Kennedys has the mainstream media ignored such familial dysfunction, lack of sexual boundaries, hardcore substance abuse issues, the hiring of sex workers, the leveraging of presidential access for money and trails of corruption, greed and thirst for power that supersede all.

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Now we’re 16 months away from the 2020 election, Joe Biden’s safely in the White House, and the Times finally decides to report on the news rather than carry the Biden campaign’s water. And they find that hey, Hunter Biden’s business interests benefited from Joe Biden’s political status to a suspicious degree. Perhaps this is a topic worthy of examination. How did the Times “authenticate” the laptop? It doesn’t say. Unlike The Post’s reporting, which detailed exactly how we got the files and where they came from, the Times does a hand wave to anonymous sources. No facts have changed since fall 2020. They knew the laptop was real from the start. They just didn’t want to say so.

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Now that the Times has deigned to confer legitimacy on the laptop, the big question is whether it will pursue its leads. The place to start would be the 2017 email regarding a deal with Chinese energy executives that states, “10 held by H for the big guy?" We know H is Hunter and Bobulinksi has said that Joe was commonly referred to as the “big guy.”

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One year after the New York Post broke the story, new emails were recently released that added new details to what was a raw influence-peddling operation which netted millions of dollars from foreign sources. A new tranche of emails connecting President Joe Biden to key accounts prove just how this political sleight of hand was worthy of Harry Houdini.

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If you want insight into how challenging life has become for reporters in the Trump era, take a glance at the author’s note for The Bidens, the controversial new book about the president and his family by Politico reporter Ben Schreckinger. No journalism is apolitical, but Schreckinger’s approach to investigating the first family is as close as you’ll find in the “moral clarity” era to old-school aspirations to objectivity.

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One year ago, The Post revealed that Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop carried proof he sold influence while his father served as vice president — and his dad, now president, knew it. Yet most other media treated the story itself as the scandal, reporting only on vague claims that sought to undermine it rather than rushing (as they would’ve under the last president) to advance it themselves.

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A severe escalation of the war on a free internet and free discourse has taken place over the last twelve months. the most severe episode of all was the joint campaign — in the weeks before the 2020 election — by the CIA, Big Tech, the liberal wing of the corporate media and the Democratic Party to censor and suppress a series of major reports about then-presidential frontrunner Joe Biden. One year later the most dispositive proof of the veracity of the documents on which those reports were based has now  emerged  — not from a right-wing news outlet that liberals have been trained to ignore and disbelieve but from one of the most mainstream news institutions in the country.

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So far a general media silence has been the response to a new Politico report seconding much of the New York Post’s 2020 reporting. If media folk become too embarrassed to ignore the story again, they will naturally be tempted to sell it as the sad tale of a troubled son whom a loving father tries to help but ultimately cannot control. But this time there’s no ignoring the presence of Joe Biden in the Washington access game.

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