Media top headlines October 14
In media news today, Katie Couric admits she protected Ruth Bader Ginsburg by editing out remarks on anthem kneelers, a former Obama ethics official slams the Biden White House for avoiding questions on Hunter Biden's artwork, and Facebook says it will treat journalist and activists as public figures
A year after Big Tech companies and media outlets worked to discredit the Hunter Biden laptop story broken by the New York Post, the implications of the astonishing episode are still being felt in American political and cultural life.
"I don't think there's any story that's as telling about where our media is, where our culture is, than that one," Fourth Watch newsletter editor Steve Krakauer told Fox News Digital.
On Oct. 14, 2020, with less than a month before Election Day, the New York Post published a story that Hunter Biden introduced his father to a top Ukrainian energy executive, which the Post reported "flies in the face of Joe Biden’s claim that he’s 'never spoken to my son about his overseas business dealings.'" The blockbuster story noted the email correspondence proving the scoop came from a tranche of data from Hunter Biden's laptop – left in a repair shop and apparently abandoned in 2019 – and also included images of him appearing to smoke crack cocaine and engage in a sex act with an unidentified woman.
With the heated race between Biden and President Donald Trump coming to a head, the provenance of the story, rather than its subject matter, became a subject of fierce debate among alarmed media and tech officials. And the efforts to suppress and even bury it started immediately.
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"The media and Big Tech suppressed it so completely that you couldn't even talk about it on social media. It is a meddling in elections unlike anything we have seen before, and it was done throughout the entire information environment," said The Federalist's Mollie Hemingway, whose new book "Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections" extensively examines the episode.
Facebook’s Policy Communications Director Andy Stone said the site would be "reducing its distribution on our platform" and added "this story is eligible to be fact-checked by Facebook's third-party fact-checking partners." Twitter, claiming the story violated its terms of service on hacked materials, locked the New York Post out of its account for weeks and blocked users from sharing the story link. A conservative outcry erupted and Twitter eventually restored the Post's account later that month.
Politico published an article quoting "dozens of former intel officials," some of whom had endorsed Joe Biden for president, who declared the story Russian disinformation without evidence. It was called a "baseless conspiracy theory," "flatly false," "dubious," "fishy," and a "smear campaign," and NPR even went out of its way to discuss why it wasn't covering the laptop's contents. The New York Times' Maggie Haberman was called "MAGA Haberman" by infuriated critics after she merely shared a quote from the Post article; she eventually deleted the tweet.
Biden went on to defeat Trump in November. Whether the story being allowed to be shared normally would have changed the election's outcome is impossible to know, but it brought a whole new meaning to the term "October surprise."
"This was obviously an effort to get candidate Biden over the finish line. And it worked," Fox News contributor Joe Concha said.
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Krakauer said collective media "guilt" over the 2016 election and the feverish coverage of Hillary Clinton's email scandal played into why outlets broke down over the New York Post story. Clinton and liberal media outlets have repeatedly excoriated the press – including themselves – since her stunning loss to Trump over what they viewed as too much focus on her private email server at the State Department, which played into wider issues of voter distrust.
"I really think journalists had this post-2016 flashback moment, where the people that had shared stories about Hillary's emails in the weeks leading up to the 2016 election felt personally guilty that they had somehow contributed to Trump miraculously winning in 2016, and they were shamed by others on Twitter and elsewhere for doing this," Krakauer said. "I think there [was] absolutely a fear that if we give this any amount of attention, it's going to be 2016 all over again, and we're going to viewed as the people who destroyed democracy."
The White House promised to keep the identities of buyers a secret, but "many ethics experts expressed sharp disapproval of the arrangement," according to Politico’s Ben Schreckinger. (Randy Holmes via Getty Images)HUNTER BIDEN ((Randy Holmes via Getty Images)HUNTER BIDEN)
CNN media correspondent Brian Stelter declared the Hunter Biden story "manufactured" by nefarious right-wing media and said, "for all we know, these emails were made up." CNN's Wolf Blitzer reported on "real fears" that Rudy Giuliani was being used as part of a Russian disinformation operation when he delivered the laptop, and NBC's Ken Dilanian praised news outlets for staying away from the story.
"This was the culmination of years of problems the media have had where they invented fake news stories about Donald Trump and they suppressed news stories that they thought would hurt his political opponents, but there was never anything as explosive or obvious or bad as what they did with the Hunter Biden story," Hemingway said.
LARA TRUMP: TRUTH ABOUT HUNTER BIDEN'S ARTWORK COULD BE ‘VERY DAMAGING’ TO BIDEN PRESIDENCY
"Anybody in a position of power who's dealing with the corrupt media need to treat them like the propagandists that they are," she added. "Don't treat them like they're operating in good faith. This is not the first time they've done this."
Even in 2021, major outlets were casting doubt on the story, with NPR calling it "discredited" and the New York Times declaring it "unsubstantiated." Yet last month, Politico reported on sources with independent access to Hunter Biden's emails that confirmed their authenticity, although it said there could still be some fake material on the computer. Hunter Biden himself, in an interview this year, said the laptop given to the New York Post "could" be his, although he wouldn't say for certain.
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Hunter Biden's business and ethical issues haven't gone away for the White House, not only for the ongoing federal investigation into his finances but also the selling of his expensive artwork. Politico's Ben Schreckinger recently wrote that he has "remained in the headlines" because he is selling his art, which "immediately invited concerns that people who wanted to ingratiate themselves with the president would overpay for his son’s art."
Schreckinger, who is working on a book about the Biden family, feels that Hunter Biden’s paintings have received the most attention but earlier episodes concerning possible Biden family conflicts of interests are still murky.
"Until they are fully aired out, they threaten to undermine the White House push to take on global corruption and restore public faith in the executive branch," Schreckinger wrote.
Yet for all the reporting on his children when Trump ran for and later held office, the Hunter Biden saga in 2020 was met with scorn.
WASHINGTON, DC - APRIL 12: World Food Program USA Board Chairman Hunter Biden (L) and U.S. Vice President Joe Biden award designer Michael Kors (C) the World Food Program USA's McGovern-Dole Leadership Award at Organization of American States on April 12, 2016 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Paul Morigi/Getty Images for World Food Program USA) (Photo by Paul Morigi/Getty Images for World Food Program USA)
"This is another example of selling off the family name and an apathetic media yawning as it happens. Because if this was Donald Trump Jr. or Eric Trump, it would be the media apocalypse," Concha said.
The question of whether to regulate Big Tech giants like Facebook and Twitter is one of the top issues facing lawmakers today, and there is some bipartisan agreement on reining in their power and influence. How to do that remains a point of contention, as well as the wider goals of said regulation efforts. For some conservatives, the New York Post laptop episode showed fears of censorship were well-founded and must be addressed.
Krakauer said such a move would be damaging for democracy, arguing that any right-wing efforts to prevent censorship would inevitably backfire.
Hemingway said action needed to be taken, however.
"Big Tech needs to have its power against the American people constrained somewhat," Hemingway said. "They meddled in a gross fashion in this election to the tune of billions of dollars. They're violating the freedom of information that we have a right to have, and they need to be taken on."
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DePauw University Professor Jeffrey McCall told Fox News Digital the "knee-jerk fashion" of how the Hunter Biden story was stifled reflected a lack of respect for the public.
"It was a terrible decision last year for Big Tech to stifle the flow of information and the decision looks even worse now," he said. "Such stifling of the flow of news not only reflected an attempt to influence the outcome of an election, but it also showed a contempt for free expression principles."
Fox News' Joseph A. Wulfsohn contributed to this report.