The media as enemies of the people

 Peter Wallison:

Along with many others, I was shocked when President Donald Trump called the media “enemies of the people.” Certainly, the major newspapers and television news outlets were unusually critical of him throughout his administration. But politicians should be willing to accept this as a price of the power they hold.

Harry Truman, who had his own problems with the press, ably put it thus: “If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen.”

However, in the last year, my views have changed. New information has shown that what Trump called the “Russia hoax” has turned out to be nothing but a flimsy and shallow trick by the campaign of his opponent, Hillary Clinton. Any vigorous effort by investigative reporters would have determined this before it became such a huge story. Reporters have sources in the intelligence community, the FBI, and even Russia.

Calls for “background” to these sources would have produced no support, yet the hoax went on for three years. Trump was right: It was a hoax, and it only had three years' worth of legs because the media didn’t want to know the truth. As the Wall Street Journal’s Holman Jenkins recently said, the story was just “too good to check out.”

But “too good to check out” is not an acceptable excuse for what the media did just before the 2020 election. In that case, the major U.S. media imposed what can only be called a news blackout when shocking news about the Biden family was reported by the New York Post three weeks before the election.

It was previously known when Joe Biden was nominated that his son, Hunter, who had no expertise in Ukraine or energy, was getting a fabulous monthly stipend ($83,000) for his membership on the board of directors of a Ukrainian energy company called Burisma. It’s not irrelevant that Ukraine was one of the countries Joe Biden had a special responsibility to oversee in the Obama administration. Could it be that Joe Biden was selling his influence through his son? Trump, we shouldn’t forget, was impeached essentially for raising this question, and later developments show he wasn’t making it up.

When asked about his son’s board membership during the 2020 campaign, Joe Biden said he had “no knowledge” about his son’s business activities — even though Hunter Biden accompanied him on his trips to Ukraine. Unfortunately for Joe Biden, a laptop owned by his son fell into the hands of the New York Post, which published a story on Oct. 14, 2020, that the laptop contained a note from a senior executive of Burisma, thanking Hunter Biden for arranging a dinner with the then-vice president. This was an important revelation. Had Joe Biden been truthful about what he knew of his son’s business activities, and in what respect had he helped these activities along?

The story got much worse for Joe Biden when a former navy officer named Tony Bobulinski appeared on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show that same week. He said he had been the chief executive officer of a since-abandoned joint venture organized by Hunter Biden that was to be funded by a Chinese group. Again, it happened that China was also a country for which Joe Biden had been given special responsibility within the Obama administration. And again, he had brought his son along on numerous trips.

In this case, however, Bobulinski had documents for a transaction involving Hunter Biden, and he said he had met with him on one of those China trips. Moreover, the documents showed how the money would be split among the participants. One document showed that Hunter Biden would be receiving, in addition to his own share, a 10% share for “the Big Guy.” Bobulinski confirmed that the “Big Guy” was Joe Biden.

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Because of the media’s blackout, neither Joe Biden nor his campaign had to respond to questions about the Chinese transaction or Joe Biden’s alleged $10 million share as “the Big Guy.” As Devine notes in the book, “Almost 50% of Biden voters polled after the election knew nothing about Hunter’s laptop, according to polling by the Media Research Center, and almost 10% said they would not have voted for Joe had they known.”

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We are suffering the consequences of this media malpractice today.  A corrupt and incompetent Biden is screwing up the economy and national security on an unheard of scale and it is because the corrupt media buried the story of Biden corruption.  The media's anti Trump bias went from the Russian hoax to a coverup of Biden corruption.  Their actions over the last six years are a disgrace to the alleged profession of journalism.  

See, also:

Inside the hypocrisy of media manipulators, censors who claim to fight misinformation