The Hunter Biden laptop scandal apparently wasn’t the only damning story the press conspired to conceal last year during the presidential election.
Former New York Times journalist Nellie Bowles alleges her reporting from Kenosha, Wisconsin, where she discovered the Black Lives Matter riots had wreaked unimaginable damage and suffering on one of the city’s poorer and multiracial commercial districts, was held back until after the election.
As anti-police riots ravaged the country last year, causing an estimated $1 billion-plus in damages, the most expensive in insurance history, Democrats and their allies in the press argued the violence was actually a good and legitimate form of political protest.
As vandals razed Kenosha last summer, torching dozens of buildings, liberal pundits argued it was no big deal because the small-business operators whose stores were burned to the ground were protected by insurance.
It was clear at the time the insurance argument was a load of nonsense. Nevertheless, then-New York Times reporter Bowles wanted to see for herself what life was like in a city destroyed in the name of “racial justice.” So, she went to Kenosha. What she found reflected poorly on both the Black Lives Matter movement and the people who excused and downplayed the violence it regularly encouraged.
Now, this isn’t the surprising part. The surprising part is that Bowles alleges her editors shelved her report until after the 2020 election in order to dampen the unrest as an issue.
“Until quite recently,” she writes this week, “the mainstream liberal argument was that burning down businesses for racial justice was both good and healthy. Burnings allowed for the expression of righteous rage, and the businesses all had insurance to rebuild.”
What she found in Kenosha was the exact opposite of what Democrats and liberal pundits claimed, she adds.
“The part of Kenosha that people burned in the riots was the poor, multi-racial commercial district, full of small, underinsured cell phone shops and car lots,” Bowles said. “It was very sad to see and to hear from people who had suffered. Beyond the financial loss, small storefronts are quite meaningful to their owners and communities, which continuously baffles the Zoom-class.”
She claims she documented all of her findings in a subsequent report. However, she then writes:
Now it could be that the piece was just bad. I’ve sent in bad ones before, and I’ll do it again. A few weeks after I filed, an editor told me: The Times wouldn’t be able to run my Kenosha insurance debacle piece until after the 2020 election, so sorry.
There were a variety of reasons given—space, timing, tweaks here or there.
Eventually the election passed. Biden was in the White House. And my Kenosha story ran. Whatever the reason for holding the piece, clearly covering the suffering, financial and otherwise, after the riots was not a priority. The reality that brought Kyle Rittenhouse into the streets was one we reporters were meant to ignore. The old man who tried to put out a blaze at a Kenosha store had his jaw broken. The top editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer had to resign in June 2020 amid staff outcry for publishing a piece with the headline, “Buildings Matter, Too.”
If you lived in those neighborhoods on fire, you were not supposed to get an extinguisher. The proper response — the only acceptable response — was to see the brick and mortar torn down, to watch the fires burn and to say: thank you.
The New York Times did not respond to the Washington Examiner’s request for comment.
Prudence demands we handle Bowles’s allegations with care. After all, there may indeed be a reasonable and innocent explanation for why her report wasn’t published until Nov. 9, 2020.
Then again, if the Hunter Biden laptop incident taught us anything, it’s that major news organizations, including the New York Times, aren’t above burying unflattering stories for the benefit of liberal politicians and causes.
