Suppression of Hunter Biden laptop story by media, Big Tech was 'all-hands-on deck cover-up': Author
Journalist and author Ashley Rindsberg argues Big Tech and the legacy media's coziness was never on greater display than its suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story in the waning days of the 2020 election.
Author Ashley Rindsberg feels The New York Times’ and Twitter’s botched handling of Hunter Biden's infamous laptop allowed Americans to focus on "trivialities" instead of truly examining whether the Biden family is corrupt.
"They chose to bury that coverage in October 2020 when it really mattered," Rindsberg told Fox News Digital, noting the Times quietly confirmed the laptop last week and Twitter made a "politically motivated" decision to keep it off the platform.
As numerous other print and television outlets outright called the laptop "Russian misinformation," the Times reported at the time that "no concrete evidence" had emerged to that regard, but it also reported "the laptop prompted concerns about Russian disinformation because the intelligence community has warned for months about Russian attempts to influence the election." Even in 2021, it referred in a tweet to the New York Post's reporting about the laptop as "unsubstantiated."
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Rindsberg, who penned the 2021 book "The Gray Lady Winked: How the New York Times's Misreporting, Distortions and Fabrications Radically Alter History," feels the Times "really jumped on the bandwagon with regard to protecting" Joe and Hunter Biden prior to the 2020 presidential election.
The laptop, which was left in a Delaware repair shop in 2019 by the first son before being turned over to the FBI by the repair shop owner, was first reported by the New York Post in October 2020 but swiftly censored by Twitter and dismissed by most mainstream media outlets. The laptop’s contents included emails, text messages, photos and financial documents between himself, his family and business associates that showed how he used his political influence in his foreign business dealings, specifically in his work as a board member of Burisma Holdings, a Ukrainian energy company.
The New York Times finally confirmed the authenticity of Hunter Biden's infamous laptop this week but critics feel it was too little, too late by the liberal newspaper. ((Randy Holmes via Getty Images))
"This was the October surprise that we've all been talking about for many years, and it doesn't get better than that when you're talking about family corruption of a major political figure who was the Democratic candidate for the presidential election in a hotly contested election, and we have this huge revelation about not just that there was some laptop, that there was corruption, international financial corruption by the son of a former vice president of the United States," Rindsberg said. "A huge story."
Rindsberg said he would understand if a news organization was "a little hesitant" to "grab it with two arms" and go all in before independently verifying it.
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"When you think about the magnitude of the story, again, we're talking about major financial corruption. And one of the country's most powerful political families that deserves front-page coverage for days on end, not a tiny couple of sentences buried way down in some article that was kept very, very quiet," Rindsberg said.
Two days after the New York Post's initial reporting, the Times published a story on Oct. 16, 2020, headlined, "Trump is said to have been warned that Giuliani was conveying Russian disinformation," which didn't mention Hunter Biden.
"Mr. Trump and Mr. Giuliani have promoted unsubstantiated claims about Mr. Biden that have aligned with Russian disinformation efforts, and Mr. Giuliani has met with a Ukrainian lawmaker whom American officials believe is a Russian agent," the Times wrote at the time. It wrote more about the questions surrounding the laptop the following week.
Last week’s confirmation of the laptop came two years later, and the Gray Lady didn’t give it a breakout story, instead using it as a colorful tidbit deep inside a report about Hunter Biden’s legal and tax issues.
"This should have been wall-to-wall coverage. This should still be covered by The New York Times," he continued. "This story is not over, and that, to me, is the most disturbing part about it is that they're treating this as if it's already kind of old news when we don't even know what the full story is."
The New York Times dismissed the Biden laptop story as "Russian disinformation" at the height of the 2020 presidential campaign. (REUTERS/Shannon Stapleton/File Photo | Getty Images)
The author feels the biggest issue is that Americans focused on "trivialities" instead of truly examining "whether or not the Biden family have been corrupted" by Ukraine.
"We're talking about a laptop, a computer repair story, whether or not The New York Times should have run a bigger story, whether or not the New York Post was right in its original. This stuff is completely irrelevant to the actual subject that needs to be covered, which is the Biden family corruption," Rindsberg said.
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Rindsberg feels suppression of the news was "a very, very successful misinformation or even a disinformation campaign" that helped Biden get elected.
"The conversation is no longer about this incredibly sensitive topic to the Democratic Party. It is now about everything but that, and it worked really well in that regard," Rindsberg said.
Twitter and other tech giants suppressed the story, even suspending the Post’s verified Twitter account and banning users from sharing the article, claiming it violated its policy of sharing hacked material, though there was no evidence that the emails published by the Post were hacked.
"This was an all-hands-on-deck type cover-up, so it wasn't enough just to have the media black it out. This had to be a sort of complete blanketing of the story, and that requires not allowing people to talk about it on social media because it wouldn't have mattered if The New York Times didn’t cover it if all of Twitter and all of Facebook and all of LinkedIn and Instagram … was speaking about it anyways," he said.
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Author Ashley Rindsberg feels the infamous laptop allowed Americans to lose sight of what really mattered: Whether or not the Biden family was corrupt. (Photo by Paul Morigi/Getty Images | Getty Images)
"That makes a lot of sense because Big Tech and the traditional news media, as much as they seem to be in opposition towards each other, sometimes they are symbiotic. They depend on each other, their businesses depend on each other. And this was one of those great examples where it was just too cozy between Twitter and the traditional news media. This is the outcome," he said.
Then-Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey eventually admitted that its policy of forbidding anyone to tweet out the Post's Hunter Biden report was a mistake and reinstated the paper’s account. "We’re baaaaaaack," the Post famously tweeted when it was allowed back on the platform days before the election.
Rindsberg feels Twitter’s decision to silence the Post's reporting was "absolutely" politically motivated.
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"I mean, we're talking about a highly regarded newspaper, serious reporters bringing real facts … This was a story about the political candidate, the candidate for the president of the United States of America's son and his political dealings and financial dealings with a corrupt government in Ukraine," he said. "This is serious news, and there was no reason other than political reasons to do what they did, which was to completely shut it down."
Fox News’ Brandon Gillespie and Joseph A. Wulfsohn contributed to this report.