People in the media see a parallel between the lurid Hunter Biden story and Hillary Clinton’s email saga of 2016, but there is no parallel. For whereas the national press at least pretended to care about Clinton’s illegally stored and deleted emails, journalists are doing everything they can to bury the Biden scandal.
“Since The New York Post began publishing its Hunter Biden articles, there’s been an escalating chorus of conservative whining about the mainstream media’s refusal to pick up its reporting,” wrote New York Times liberal Michelle Goldberg on Monday. She added that “Most reputable reporters aren’t taking the bait.”
How diligent and wise of “most reputable reporters.” But this is the exact opposite of political journalism, a field wherein people are literally paid to take “the bait.” True, reporters aren’t supposed to print unfounded rumors or other materials that haven’t been vetted. But like the story of Clinton’s emails, that’s not what this is. The Biden scandal comes with photographs and emails whose veracity has not been contested by Biden nor his father, Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden.
Though, we could have guessed this would happen. Liberal journalists have been apologizing ever since 2016 for covering a major story of that year’s campaign — Clinton’s violation of national security rules and open-records laws. Her emails were government property, and she deleted them.
So why would these journalists now risk doing anything that would hurt President Trump’s latest challenger? They won’t. That’s why the media are doing everything they can to avoid the substance of the Hunter Biden scandal.
If they’re going to talk about it, it will be in any way except to address the substance. The real story, they say, is that Twitter and Facebook banned the original New York Post article from being shared on their platforms. The real story, they say, is that some reporters at the New York Post questioned the decision to publish it. The real story, they say, is that Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani is up to no good.
“If there’s an important story here,” wrote Goldberg, “it’s almost certainly about [Rudy] Giuliani’s dirty tricks, not any wrongdoing by Joe Biden.”
Yeah, okay.
And let’s not forget about Russia. When all other avenues have been exhausted, try Russia.
Politico, on Monday, actually published a story about a letter signed by a few dozen former U.S. intelligence officials who signed a letter declaring their certainty that the Hunter Biden story is part of a Russian disinformation campaign.
How do they know? Surely they must have some first-hand knowledge that the very things that the Bidens themselves have not denied the authenticity of are illegitimate.
Nope. “While the letter’s signatories presented no new evidence,” Politico said, “they said their national security experience had made them ‘deeply suspicious that the Russian government played a significant role in this case’ and cited several elements of the story that suggested the Kremlin’s hand at work.'”
Deeply suspicious, you say? Well, in that case, nobody is to say another word about Hunter Biden. The case is closed.
The media aren’t burying the Hunter Biden story because it’s illegitimate. They’re burying it because they fear it’s for real.
