On Thursday morning, while some leftist media outlets (ABC and CNN) tried to cover-up a bombshell New York Post story alleging new evidence of Hunter Biden’s corrupt business dealing with Ukraine and Joe Biden’s knowledge of it, others rushed to play defense for the Democratic nominee by claiming the reporting was part of a “disinformation campaign” or declaring it “false” without evidence.
After all three network evening newscasts censored the potential latest twist in the Biden scandal, on Thursday, CBS This Morning finally noticed story, but only to dismiss the report. “Plus, how the President is trying to revive an old attack line, using the Vice President’s son,” co-host and Democratic Party donor Gayle King announced at the top of the show.
Moments later, her fellow co-host Anthony Mason repeated the claim of it being old news: “Yesterday, the President held a rally in Iowa, where he tried to revive an old line of attack against Joe Biden based on suspicious new claims linked to Rudy Giuliani.”
In the segment that followed, correspondent Paula Reid very briefly provided a vague description of the accusations:
With weeks until the election and trailing in the polls, President Trump seized on a report in The New York Post, published Wednesday, claiming files and emails were taken from the laptop that allegedly previously belonged to Hunter Biden. The report alleges that the former Vice President used his position to advance his son’s business interests in Ukraine and that both Bidens were not truthful about that relationship.
She then touted: “The Biden campaign said the allegations were false and noted that an investigation by Senate Republicans had cleared the former Vice President of any wrongdoing in Ukraine.” The headline on screen blared: “Trump Seizes on Hunter Biden Claims; Biden Campaign Says Allegations Reported in NY Post Are False.”
In addition, Reid warned viewers: “The story’s sourcing has also raised questions about its authenticity, as the files were given to the Post through an attorney for the President’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, and allegedly obtained from a repair shop owner who said the device was allegedly left and never picked up.”
Wrapping up the limited coverage (which amounted to 1 minute 45 seconds of air time), Reid uncritically related the outrageous attempts by social media companies to censor the story:
Twitter and Facebook have limited the distribution of that Hunter Biden story and last night Twitter appeared to suspend the Twitter account of White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany when she tried to share that story. Now Twitter clarified they have taken that action because the article contained images of personal information like private e-mail addresses and what Twitter classified as hacked material. Sharing hacked and private information violates Twitter’s rules.
On NBC’s Today show, White House correspondent Hallie Jackson largely avoided any of the unflattering details for the Bidens as she downplayed the news: “...this is a questionably-sourced story, to say the least, it appeared in a tabloid, that President Trump and allies are really trying to seize on here, alleging that Joe Biden may have had a meeting that was set up with somebody that Hunter Biden worked with on this Ukrainian company.”
She actually cited the Biden campaign as a way of fact-checking the story:
Now, the story is so dubious – and we should note, by the way, that the Biden campaign says that meeting was never on Biden’s official schedule. But Facebook and Twitter made moves to try to limit the spread of this story. And the Washington Post is reporting that some intelligence experts think this has the hallmark of like a disinformation campaign meant to interfere with the election.
Co-host Savannah Guthrie very quickly and blandly acknowledged controversy surrounding the social media bans: “And extraordinary because Twitter’s CEO also said Twitter should have communicated better about why it was taking down the content.”
That 45 second exchange was the extent of NBC’s coverage of the story, but at least the network acknowledged its existence. ABC’s Good Morning America completely skipped the bad news for Biden.
Meanwhile, MSNBC’s Morning Joe provided only one brief allusion to the New York Post story during the entire three hour show on Thursday. That was when co-host Joe Scarborough took 44 seconds to mock the report as “false”:
And by the way, Mika, when there is a New York Post article that is false, it’s much better for Twitter to let people read The New York Post article and sit there and laugh at the hokie story of a computer repairman looking at a computer, going, “This sure does look suspicious to me. I’m going to call Rudy Giuliani.” Like, let that out. Okay? [Laughter] Because people will read this story, and then they’ll go, “This is really one of the stupidest October surprises I’ve ever seen before.” What did he have, x-ray vision?...“This don’t look right...wonder if America’s mayor could take a look at it.”
Doing the Biden campaign’s bidding, CNN’s New Day steered clear of the topic.
Given the number of supposed “bombshells” the left-wing press reported on throughout its promotion of the Russian collusion conspiracy theory that were either wildly misleading or completely untrue, you would think reporters would at least investigate the story about Biden.
On Thursday, The New York Post published more Hunter Biden emails showing that he “pursued lucrative deals involving China’s largest private energy company — including one that he said would be ‘interesting for me and my family.’”
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