The NYP clearly also had some internal angst about publishing the story as evidenced by the weirdness that happened with the byline. The fact of the matter is this: The story was a TIMED RELEASE by a political campaign - Giuliani had the laptop for almost a year at that point - and it was designed to be difficult to verify or vet prior t…
The NYP clearly also had some internal angst about publishing the story as evidenced by the weirdness that happened with the byline. The fact of the matter is this: The story was a TIMED RELEASE by a political campaign - Giuliani had the laptop for almost a year at that point - and it was designed to be difficult to verify or vet prior to the election due to Giuliani controlling who could access the source material. Which put news orgs in the position of either repeating the claims in the NYP story uncritically or declining to run the story at all until more info became available.
The primary source of anger and discontent from the conservative sphere is that the MSM did not dutifully play along with the October surprise smear as expected. I submit that it is not a media org's job to publish a story on a political party's schedule and terms. And if Giuliani thought the contents of the laptop were of critical import to the American people, he should have allowed unfettered access to the source material months prior to allow proper investigation. The fact that he didn't signals a lack of confidence in the substance of the material and that, if the source, narrative, and spin were not tightly controlled, the headline shock would quickly be replaced by "wait, that's it?".
All of this is to say that Berliner deploying the laptop story as an example of a failing and biased newsroom is dubious at best. He almost certainly is aware of all of this context and chose to press ahead with his claim anyway which really undercuts his whole argument which is that NPR is a biased news room that should work to be less biased. By invoking this particular example, he seems to be indicating that what he *really* wants is not less bias - it's that he wants his preferred brands of bias to be given equal time.
Do you really think NPR and the rest of the MSM would have been so circumspect if a Democratic operative had released evidence of Eric Trump cavorting with prostitutes, doing drugs, and engaging in slimy, if technically legal influence peddling?
We already know the answer based on how they handled the Steele dossier. The only difference between that and Hunter’s laptop is that the latter was 100% authentic.
I don't know where this narrative came from that the MSM embraced the Steele Dossier but it's patently false. Every single old media news outlet refused to run a story of the allegations from it. Buzzfeed News finally ran it when nobody else would and they ran it with the subheading "The allegations are unverified, and the report contains errors."
As for your first point, nobody at the time was alleging that Hunter's business dealings were legal and merely ethically shady. The whole point of withholding the source data was to launder salacious, yet vague, rumors into the discourse right before the election. Some people were even suggesting that maybe there were videos of sex acts with children on there!
Good point about the way the media handled the dossier story initially. They were actually far more reticent about it than the laptop story. Only Mother Jones, which isn't part of the MSM, published about it in any substantial way before the election, even though many outlets were briefed on it long before.
See the thing about Rudy Giuliani is that he was already known to have previously spread Russia-backed propaganda from his prior little private expeditions to Russia on behalf of Donald Trump as his personal lawyer. So not only was there absolutely no reason to trust anything coming from him that couldn't be verified, there was overwhelming evidence to suggest than anything coming from him might very well be more intentional deception from our adversaries.
And as it is, the intimation that there was evidence of criminality by Joe Biden on the laptop was completely false, so people getting outraged about how a "legitimate" story was "suppressed" before an an election are basically complaining that a precisely-timed political oppo dump wasn't allowed to deceive people to its full potential like it could have if legitimate news organizations had shown the same credulousness they did in 2016 with Jim Comey's abundance-of-caution notification to Congress on the matter of Huma Abdein laptop (which, of course, turned out to be nothing). Thankfully, they learned their lesson.
In the end, given how much the story blew up after Twitter prevented people from clicking on the NYP story for a whole twenty four hours before reversing its decision, it's questionable whether any aspect of the story was really "suppressed". But at least the mainstream media didn't treat it like an unqualified scandal, the first of a presumed Joe Biden presidential administration rather than an entirely suspect potential political hit job. Because that's absolutely what it was, regardless of the fact that the laptop was real.
Probably. Confronted with good reasons for the “MSM” to have held back on initially reporting on a story nakedly pushed by a political campaign, you retreated into an unfalsifiable hypothetical.
Also, as others have pointed out, the MSM handled the Steele dossier appropriately — almost completely ignoring it — despite your revisionism.
Most of the MSM treated the Russian collusion/Steele dossier story the same way it did the laptop story, reported both as allegations.
One difference was the timing and strange story, though, which naturally made people more suspicious of the laptop story. But both stories were covered with caution by the MSM.
Your comment prompted me to Google “pee tape” where I was treated to an avalanche of cautious, sober-minded reporting over a 4 year period, including one in New York Magazine by Jonathan Chait titled “I’m a Peeliever - And You Should Be Too.” Thanks for the trip down memory lane, full of careful reporting and healthy journalistic skepticism regarding the Steele dossier.
The scary part here is that you cannot differentiate between reporting and opinion pieces on your own. This is the type of media illiteracy in the general population that reinforces how uneducated in critical thinking Americans are.
A lot of the material on there - likely even the vast majority of it - was Hunter Biden's data. But the hard drive had obviously been tampered with. And I don't mean in the spy sense of tampering. I mean that the contents of the hard drive had been circulating amongst Republican operatives and someone took the time to organize some of the materials into folders that Hunter obviously didn't create. The chain of custody for the data was non-existent. So it's impossible to say that the laptop was actually his when it could have also been an iCloud hack transplanted onto a computer and taken into a blind man's repair shop.
Mac Isaac, the blind computer repairman who supposedly received several laptops from Biden, said those copies weren't true to what he downloaded when his lawyer gave CBS a copy.
CBS ought to reconsider who they hire as experts, as they didn't get an image of the hard drive: just a drive with files copied from another source or sources.
No one outside the FBI can tell if there was any tampering with the laptop as none of them have seen the laptop. MacIsaac didn't image the hard drive: he just copied files over to another drive.
It remains that if Hunter Biden had any reason to believe there was significant tampering, he would have said so. There's no getting around that. He's in a position to know.
Total nonsense. NPR Had no evidence that the laptop was Russian disinformation. Anyone with a brain would know the laptop was real from the jump. It was the Biden family. Wtf
The NYP clearly also had some internal angst about publishing the story as evidenced by the weirdness that happened with the byline. The fact of the matter is this: The story was a TIMED RELEASE by a political campaign - Giuliani had the laptop for almost a year at that point - and it was designed to be difficult to verify or vet prior to the election due to Giuliani controlling who could access the source material. Which put news orgs in the position of either repeating the claims in the NYP story uncritically or declining to run the story at all until more info became available.
The primary source of anger and discontent from the conservative sphere is that the MSM did not dutifully play along with the October surprise smear as expected. I submit that it is not a media org's job to publish a story on a political party's schedule and terms. And if Giuliani thought the contents of the laptop were of critical import to the American people, he should have allowed unfettered access to the source material months prior to allow proper investigation. The fact that he didn't signals a lack of confidence in the substance of the material and that, if the source, narrative, and spin were not tightly controlled, the headline shock would quickly be replaced by "wait, that's it?".
All of this is to say that Berliner deploying the laptop story as an example of a failing and biased newsroom is dubious at best. He almost certainly is aware of all of this context and chose to press ahead with his claim anyway which really undercuts his whole argument which is that NPR is a biased news room that should work to be less biased. By invoking this particular example, he seems to be indicating that what he *really* wants is not less bias - it's that he wants his preferred brands of bias to be given equal time.
Do you really think NPR and the rest of the MSM would have been so circumspect if a Democratic operative had released evidence of Eric Trump cavorting with prostitutes, doing drugs, and engaging in slimy, if technically legal influence peddling?
We already know the answer based on how they handled the Steele dossier. The only difference between that and Hunter’s laptop is that the latter was 100% authentic.
I don't know where this narrative came from that the MSM embraced the Steele Dossier but it's patently false. Every single old media news outlet refused to run a story of the allegations from it. Buzzfeed News finally ran it when nobody else would and they ran it with the subheading "The allegations are unverified, and the report contains errors."
As for your first point, nobody at the time was alleging that Hunter's business dealings were legal and merely ethically shady. The whole point of withholding the source data was to launder salacious, yet vague, rumors into the discourse right before the election. Some people were even suggesting that maybe there were videos of sex acts with children on there!
Good point about the way the media handled the dossier story initially. They were actually far more reticent about it than the laptop story. Only Mother Jones, which isn't part of the MSM, published about it in any substantial way before the election, even though many outlets were briefed on it long before.
See the thing about Rudy Giuliani is that he was already known to have previously spread Russia-backed propaganda from his prior little private expeditions to Russia on behalf of Donald Trump as his personal lawyer. So not only was there absolutely no reason to trust anything coming from him that couldn't be verified, there was overwhelming evidence to suggest than anything coming from him might very well be more intentional deception from our adversaries.
And as it is, the intimation that there was evidence of criminality by Joe Biden on the laptop was completely false, so people getting outraged about how a "legitimate" story was "suppressed" before an an election are basically complaining that a precisely-timed political oppo dump wasn't allowed to deceive people to its full potential like it could have if legitimate news organizations had shown the same credulousness they did in 2016 with Jim Comey's abundance-of-caution notification to Congress on the matter of Huma Abdein laptop (which, of course, turned out to be nothing). Thankfully, they learned their lesson.
In the end, given how much the story blew up after Twitter prevented people from clicking on the NYP story for a whole twenty four hours before reversing its decision, it's questionable whether any aspect of the story was really "suppressed". But at least the mainstream media didn't treat it like an unqualified scandal, the first of a presumed Joe Biden presidential administration rather than an entirely suspect potential political hit job. Because that's absolutely what it was, regardless of the fact that the laptop was real.
Probably. Confronted with good reasons for the “MSM” to have held back on initially reporting on a story nakedly pushed by a political campaign, you retreated into an unfalsifiable hypothetical.
Also, as others have pointed out, the MSM handled the Steele dossier appropriately — almost completely ignoring it — despite your revisionism.
Most of the MSM treated the Russian collusion/Steele dossier story the same way it did the laptop story, reported both as allegations.
One difference was the timing and strange story, though, which naturally made people more suspicious of the laptop story. But both stories were covered with caution by the MSM.
Your comment prompted me to Google “pee tape” where I was treated to an avalanche of cautious, sober-minded reporting over a 4 year period, including one in New York Magazine by Jonathan Chait titled “I’m a Peeliever - And You Should Be Too.” Thanks for the trip down memory lane, full of careful reporting and healthy journalistic skepticism regarding the Steele dossier.
An opinion piece is not "reporting". Legacy media orgs like NPR keep their editorials completely separate from their hard news departments.
New York Magazine isn't part of the MSM, and who knows what Chait, who isn't a reporter, was talking about.
You haven't refuted what I said, if facts matter.
The scary part here is that you cannot differentiate between reporting and opinion pieces on your own. This is the type of media illiteracy in the general population that reinforces how uneducated in critical thinking Americans are.
Uh buddy, the laptop was compromised: https://www.emptywheel.net/2023/07/08/the-laptop-everyone-knows-as-hunter-bidens-appears-to-have-been-deleted-starting-february-15-2019/
Hard to tell from that how it was compromised. Hunter Biden hasn't ever disputed anything published from the NYP's copy, as far as I've seen.
A lot of the material on there - likely even the vast majority of it - was Hunter Biden's data. But the hard drive had obviously been tampered with. And I don't mean in the spy sense of tampering. I mean that the contents of the hard drive had been circulating amongst Republican operatives and someone took the time to organize some of the materials into folders that Hunter obviously didn't create. The chain of custody for the data was non-existent. So it's impossible to say that the laptop was actually his when it could have also been an iCloud hack transplanted onto a computer and taken into a blind man's repair shop.
The person who would best know whether any substantial tampering occurred has never alleged that. It seems highly unlikely he wouldn't if it occurred.
Mac Isaac, the blind computer repairman who supposedly received several laptops from Biden, said those copies weren't true to what he downloaded when his lawyer gave CBS a copy.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/hunter-biden-laptop-data-analysis/
CBS ought to reconsider who they hire as experts, as they didn't get an image of the hard drive: just a drive with files copied from another source or sources.
This doesn't conflict with what I said. It's highly unlikely there was any substantial tampering.
No one outside the FBI can tell if there was any tampering with the laptop as none of them have seen the laptop. MacIsaac didn't image the hard drive: he just copied files over to another drive.
It remains that if Hunter Biden had any reason to believe there was significant tampering, he would have said so. There's no getting around that. He's in a position to know.
How is he in a position to know? He doesn't have the laptop, either. The FBI does.
Total nonsense. NPR Had no evidence that the laptop was Russian disinformation. Anyone with a brain would know the laptop was real from the jump. It was the Biden family. Wtf