The media censorship of the Hunter Biden laptop story

  Steve Krakauer:

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... As bad as so much of the Trump Era reporting was, what took place with the Hunter Biden laptop story and the New York Post censorship at the end of his presidency was perhaps the most egregious and obvious example of the elite censorship collusion racket between tech companies, government forces and the national media that we’ve ever seen.

We have seen now through the Twitter Files revelations that there was specific cooperation between Twitter and the FBI in the important months and weeks before the laptop story broke. But we must always remember how the media was a key cog in the racket – which allowed the censorship to take place, rather than jump to the defense of their New York Post colleagues.

"I tweeted a link to the NYP story right after it dropped yesterday morning. I immediately reached out to the Biden campaign to see if they had any answer. I wish i had given the story a closer read before tweeting it," tweeted reporter Jake Sherman, then of Politico, who continued his misspelling-laden apologetic tweet for daring to link to the story at the time: "my goal was not to spread informatoin. my goal was to raise questions about the story—as i did in subsequent tweets—and see how the biden campaign was going to respond. They later did respond."

It was utter panic. And why? The media wasn’t overly outraged about the egregious overreach from Twitter and other social platforms against a media outlet because it had journalistic PTSD from 2016.

There were two factors at the core of the media’s relative silence on the matter: guilt and fear. The press truly believed they were partly responsible for Donald Trump’s shocking victory over Hillary Clinton four years earlier, thanks to their coverage of her emails, the early easier treatment they gave him during the primary, and more. They felt guilty – and were not going to make that same mistake again.

And then there was fear. The social media ostracization. The attacks from their colleagues. Maggie Haberman of the New York Times previously worked at the New York Post, and she dared to link to the story early on the 14th, even though she was questioning the sourcing of it. By the afternoon she was trending on Twitter as "MAGA Haberman" for her supposed crime.

In my new book "Uncovered: How the Media Got Cozy With Power, Abandoned Its Principles, and Lost the People," I begin with the Hunter laptop story, because it truly exemplifies the overly censorious era that was to come out of the Trump Era. The media was fine with the censorship, because it was a means to an end.

For the book, I talked to dozens of media members, on-the-record. "I think there’s a really, really worrying tendency on the left and the mainstream media and the Democratic Party to censor anything undesirable as if that would make it go away," Shawn McCreesh, who worked at the New York Times at the time the New York Post published its first Hunter Biden story in October 2020, and now works for New York magazine, told me. "...Instead of either burying the story inside the paper, or just touching it lightly, the way they tried to wiggle out of covering it was by insinuating that it might not have even been real, which was a huge mistake, because of course everybody knew it was real. It was knowable. It was so obviously real."
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Rich McHugh, a longtime investigative journalist previously at NBC News and other outlets, sees the tech suppression as a huge problem. "It’s shameful. It shouldn’t be happening with Big Tech," he told me. "...It’s this curious time where these major corporations are dictating what news we get. And I think there’s inherent problems in that. It shouldn’t be that way."

"However you feel about Trump or Biden, I do think it further diminishes, further erodes, the trust in the media, when it looks like you’re hammering Russia, Russia, Russia, Russia. Russia, on the Trump side, and then there’s one little hint of impropriety on the Biden side, and it’s like, ‘we can’t even talk about that. We can’t even acknowledge that, God forbid, because the other side is so bad.’ I think it’s dangerous," former New York Times reporter Amy Chozick, who previously covered the Hillary Clinton campaign, told me.
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I think they hated Trump more than they loved the truth.

If they had been honest about it would not have taken them two years to finally admit the truth after the election of Joe Biden one of the worst presidents in history.  They were constantly lying about Trump from the Russian collusion hoax to the insurrection hoax at the end of his term.  Despite their treatment of Trump, he was easily a much better president than Biden. Under Trump, the US had lower inflation and was not involved in any wars.  The economy was better despite the lies of the Democrats and their media cohorts.