Paper mulls: Why was the Hunter Biden story buried in the run-up to the 2020 election?
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Duh!
Let’s recap the story…
In October 2020 (i.e. a month before the election), the NY Post broke a story that a laptop belonging to Hunter Biden had surfaced which contained emails and other documentation that Hunter had “earned” millions of dollars by trading on his father’s name and political clout … with the Ukrainians and Chinese.
The story was conveniently ignored or dismissed by Biden-supporting media (i.e. all but the NY Post and Fox) as “Russian misinformation”.
A couple dozen “intelligence officials” lent credence to the disinformation claim in an open letter … though many of them admitted they had no evidence of Russian involvement.
So, the story was effectively blacked out … Twitter banned the NY Post and squashed posts that referenced the laptop story … Facebook’s algorithms buried the story.
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But, last month — a year and a half after the NYP’s story broke — the New York Times published an article indicating that they had confirmed that the laptop story was essentially true … and that there was hard evidence that Hunter had been profiting by trading on his father’s position as then-VP.
Holy Smokes, Batman … America’s self-proclaimed newspaper of record says there’s fire under the smoke.
Following the Times’ authentication, the Washington Post apparently felt some need to dig into the story and “discovered” evidence of Hunter’s misdeeds.
Apparently, those revelations stirred some ethical angst at WaPo … whose editors wrote a mea culpa of sorts:
A “reckoning”?
The editorial fessed that the essence of the laptop story was true … but, it threw shade, arguing that Joe was oblivious to Hunter’s alleged misdeeds … and, articulated a journalistic dilemma:
The lesson learned from 2016 was evidently to err on the side of setting aside questionable material in the heat of a political campaign.
The lesson learned from 2020 may well be that there’s also a danger of suppressing accurate and relevant stories.
Who could have ever imagined that suppressing accurate and relevant stories might pose a danger?
What kind of danger?
Tilting an election to the media’s candidate of choice? Away from a candidate that they loathed?
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For the record…
After the election, Democrats who voted for Biden were polled.
> More than 1/3 (36%) said that they didn’t know about the Hunter laptop and his influence peddling
> Of the “know nothings” about 1 in 8 (12.7%) said that they “would not have voted for Joe Biden had they known this story”.
> Doing the math, that means that 4.6% of all Democrats wouldn’t have voted for Biden if they were aware of the story
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Remind me: What was Biden’s margin of victory in Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin?
And WaPo — channeling George Costanza — asks: Was it wrong to to bury a story that might have turned an election?
The Homa Files 