Networks will continue to ‘gloss over’ report on Hunter Biden: Lawrence Jones
Fox News contributor Lawrence Jones argues the Democratic Party is ‘afraid’ coverage of Hunter Biden will hurt the Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden.
The mainstream media went into overdrive to dismiss Wednesday's New York Post bombshell revealing damning emails allegedly found on Hunter Biden's computer, with some outlets simply ignoring the development and others doing their best to cast the report as dubious.
The New York Post report, entitled “Smoking-gun email reveals how Hunter Biden introduced Ukrainian businessman to VP dad,” touched on suggestions that the former vice president’s son had unscrupulous financial and business ties to a natural gas firm in Ukraine -- Burisma Holdings -- and that his father later stepped in to have a probing prosecutor fired for looking into the matter.
The article, which Fox News hasn’t independently verified in full, also claimed that the outlet had been given emails showing Hunter had introduced his father to a top executive at the energy firm, less than a year before the prosecutor was forced out.
If true, the developments could be extremely damning to the Democrat less than three weeks before the election, but many media organizations were shockingly incurious about the October surprise.
CNN completely ignored the story on Wednesday, somehow managing to fill its airtime while also skipping almost the entirety of the historic Amy Coney Barrett hearing.
The controversy escalated throughout the day after both Facebook and Twitter began suppressing the Post's report on their platforms, claiming it violated their policies against hacking and publishing certain private information, sparking major backlash from conservative journalists and lawmakers. Twitter’s own CEO Jack Dorsey even admitted they botched the situation.
Despite big tech becoming part of the story, the uproar wasn't enough for CNN to mention it to its viewers. But liberal CNN wasn’t the only organization to ignore or dismiss the story.
“Being the loyal Democratic foot soldiers that they were, ABC, CBS, and NBC all censored the bombshell from their evening newscasts,” NewsBusters analyst Nicholas Fondacaro wrote.
“It’s really no wonder the liberal networks were hiding this extremely damaging information from their viewers,” Fondacaro added. “And since they refused to cover the Post’s bombshell, by extension they couldn’t talk about Orwellian censorship from Facebook and Twitter as they tried to frantically stop the story from spreading.”
NBC News finally mentioned it Thursday morning when Hallie Jackson was brought on “Today” to question the “dubious” story’s legitimacy.
“This is a questionably sourced story, to say the least," Jackson told viewers. "It appeared in a tabloid, that President Trump and his allies are really trying to seize on.”
On Thursday, ABC’s “Good Morning America” skipped the story altogether while “CBS This Morning” discussed it for less than two minutes.
MSNBC has essentially ignored the story, too, but “Morning Joe” namesake Joe Scarborough found time to dismiss it as “false” on Thursday morning under the guise of condemning Twitter censorship.
“It’s much better for Twitter to let people read the New York Post article and sit there and laugh at the hokey story,” Scarborough said before attempting to imitate what he imagines a stereotypical President Trump supporter sounds like.
He went on to call it one of the “stupidest October surprises” in recent memory. MSNBC producer Kyle Griffin even urging his Twitter followers not to share the article, which he called "disinformation."
"No one should link to or share that NY Post 'report.' You can discuss the obvious flaws and unanswerable questions in the report without amplifying what appears to be disinformation," Griffin wrote.
MEDIA MEMBERS PRESSURE SOCIAL MEDIA USERS NOT TO SHARE NEW YORK POST'S HUNTER BIDEN REPORT
The New York Times covered the story with the headline, “Allegation on Biden Prompts Pushback From Social Media Companies,” and focused on social media platforms making the decsion that the story was “deemed so dubious that they limited access to the article on their platforms.”
Meanwhile, NPR called the story “unsubstantiated” and the Washington Post published an “explainer” detailing what the paper determined to be flaws in the story.
“It’s entirely fair to suspect that the Hunter Biden email story is either Russian disinformation or the fruits of Russian hacking. Journalists should write those stories. Censoring the story itself is un-American. And for Russiagaters, of all people, to push this line is chutzpa,” Bloomberg’s Eli Lake observed.
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Fox Business' Audrey Conklin, Paul Conner, and Nick Givas contributed to this report.