If New York Times reporters Ken Vogel and Iuliia Mendel have not already had an angry conversation with their editors about the headline used to promote their report detailing legitimate questions about the Biden family’s possible conflicts of interest, they should.
Vogel and Mendel’s deeply sourced, well-reported story works through the complicated details of former Vice President Joe Biden’s successful efforts in 2016 to oust one of Ukraine’s top prosecutors, and how it may have benefited the 2020 presidential candidate’s son, Hunter.
“[Joe Biden’s] pressure campaign worked,” write Vogel and Mendel. “The prosecutor general, long a target of criticism from other Western nations and international lenders, was soon voted out by the Ukrainian Parliament.”
They add, “Among those who had a stake in the outcome was Hunter Biden, Mr. Biden’s younger son, who at the time was on the board of an energy company owned by a Ukrainian oligarch who had been in the sights of the fired prosecutor general.”
And this is how the Times headlined the 2,500-plus-word report: “Biden Faces Conflict of Interest Questions That Are Being Promoted by Trump and Allies.”
Fun fact: In journalism, nine out 10 times the headline is picked by editors, not the journalists.
All that work and effort reporting on fair questions about whether the son of a Democratic presidential candidate profited from his father’s involvement in U.S. foreign policy activities, and the Times’ editors kneecap the story from the get-go with a headline insinuating that this is just a bunch Trump-world nonsense.
To be clear, the Times report does dedicate time and energy to detailing the efforts by President Trump and his allies to shine a light on the personal and public activities of the Biden family.
The report reads:
The Trump team’s efforts to draw attention to the Bidens’ work in Ukraine, which is already yielding coverage in conservative media, has been led partly by Rudolph W. Giuliani, who served as a lawyer for Mr. Trump in the investigation by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III. Mr. Giuliani’s involvement raises questions about whether Mr. Trump is endorsing an effort to push a foreign government to proceed with a case that could hurt a political opponent at home.
Giuliani is quoted in the report as saying that the Biden questions cropped up during a larger investigation into whether Ukrainian activists helped jump-start the special counsel’s since-shuttered two-year investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.
“I can assure you this all started with an allegation about possible Ukrainian involvement in the investigation of Russian meddling, and not Biden,” Giuliani said. “The Biden piece is collateral to the bigger story, but must still be investigated, but without the prejudgments that infected the collusion story.”
But the Trump stuff is only a part of the reporters’ much deeper dive into the financial and foreign policy activities of the Bidens.
There are legitimate questions about whether the former vice president’s family benefited financially from his years in the White House, and the Times reporters do an excellent job exploring these questions. The headline picked by the Times editors, however, fails entirely to convey the legitimacy of these questions to the reader.
Instead, it is suggested right off the bat that inquiries about whether the Bidens have profited from an unethical overlap of public and private activities are just more crazy stuff promoted by Trump’s allies. That is a disservice to readers and to the reporters who put the story together.
