As October surprises go during a presidential election, Hunter Biden’s laptop promised to be a doozy. After all, it had not just Hunter’s misdeeds, but evidence suggesting that his dad was anything but clean.
“The big guy” was going to get his 10 percent, reportedly, of Hunter’s influence peddling, for example—based on an email from the time when Joe Biden was vice president.
But within no time at all, the media rallied. Supposed intelligence experts called the laptop “Russian disinformation.” Social media companies censored all mention of the laptop. The New York Post, who broke the story, even saw their Twitter account locked for a time.
There was a full court press to denounce the contents of the laptop.
And it worked. Joe Biden became president and there’s no evidence the contents of that computer hurt him in the least. After all, why would Russian disinformation hurt him?
Only, as we learned in Hunter’s trial that concluded this week, it wasn’t disinformation. We knew it had been confirmed previously, but its admission in the trial made it very clear that it was legit. Otherwise, Hunter’s lawyers would have been able to get it excluded from the evidence.
And over at the Washington Post, they want you to think that this was nothing.
Sean Hannity began his Fox News show Tuesday by demanding that his audience understand the real point of significance from the trial that led to felony convictions for President Biden’s son Hunter. It wasn’t that Hunter Biden was facing accountability; it was that he and his allies in the right-wing media had been right all along about a laptop that once belonged to Hunter Biden.
“The critical development from this trial is one huge, single piece of evidence entered into the official record by your U.S. government,” Hannity said, “and that’s Hunter Biden’s very real laptop. Not only did the U.S. federal government confirm that Hunter’s laptop is real, they confirmed that its contents are real, and the contents have not been tampered with by anybody.”
“In other words,” he continued, “you were lied to on a very high level just before an election by numerous people and entire institutions.”
Hannity’s argument is that opponents of Donald Trump circled the wagons in October 2020 to falsely attack a report from the New York Post that centered on material taken from Hunter Biden’s laptop. A letter from a number of former intelligence officials “called it Russian disinformation,” in the phrasing of Hannity’s guest, commentator Jonathan Turley. Social media companies opted to limit the spread of the story after it was published. All of this, in Hannity’s presentation, has been shown to be not only erroneous but a function of “lies” from people who “wanted Joe Biden to win by any means necessary.”
Writer Philip Bump goes on to try and claim that the media did everything right, that they eventually verified the contents of the laptop.
That’s true.
The problem is that by the time they did so, the election was over. Joe Biden was the president and it was that much harder for the American people to respond. Plus, it was at a point in time when the outrage was bound to die down so it wouldn’t play as much of a factor in the next election.
Bump argues that the delay was because they didn’t have an opportunity to verify the files as legitimate earlier, but that’s on shaky ground. After all, the New York Post isn’t exactly the Weekly World News. The story wasn’t tucked in between the latest story of Bat Boy getting married and how Elvis was currently hanging out with Tupac in a seaside community in New Jersey.
No, it was a legitimate news publication that had the story and rather than report it as it was, the media tripped over itself to remain silent. They could have included a bit about not having a chance to examine the evidence themselves, but that’s not what happened. NPR, for example, said it wasn’t news.
Bump finishes up with this:
We should not necessarily assume that Sean Hannity or his guests are being sincere in their lamentations about the failures of the media. It is politically useful for the right and for Trump to suggest that the Hunter Biden trial revealed something novel and incriminating about the traditional media. It didn’t, but readers of this article probably don’t need to be convinced of that. And Hannity’s viewers probably aren’t reading this, so why not say it?
Except it does say something incriminating about the traditional media. It says that they were too biased to look at the story when there was a chance it might benefit Trump. Once that threat had passed, then they were willing to look.
The media tripped over itself to not just ignore the story but to act like it wasn’t really a story beyond “Russian interference.”
Bump is disgusting in his defense here because he’s trying to gaslight the entirety of this nation into believing that the media handled this whole thing correctly. He figures that his readers, at least, are stupid enough to buy that and repeat it publicly. He also apparently figured that no one who disagreed would bother to read the Washington Post.
Well, if the Post had paywalled this one like they do most stories, I wouldn’t have bothered with this one. They didn’t, which made it fair game on Twitter where tons of people can see the gaslighting as it happens.
Bump can’t change what happened. He can’t change our memories of what happened. What he hopes to change, though, is whether people will trust those memories.
The media, including social media, did all it could to bury the story until after the election because they’re not about the truth. They’re about the narrative, and Bump is trying to craft a new one about the laptop.
This is why you should hate the media and why you don’t hate them enough.
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Literally just minutes after this one went live, I came across this threat from Matt Taibbi on X ripping apart the New York Times and their similar nonsense.
https://x.com/mtaibbi/status/1801338684962131993