Media hides Hunter Biden’s laptop scandal, says Eddie Scarry.

The National Media’s Biggest Con: Suppressing the Hunter Biden Laptop Story

For all their talk of “disinformation” and “collusion,” recent reports show that the national media, career intelligence officials, and Big Tech were the most guilty of both. They plotted to suppress and discredit the fully authentic and legitimate Hunter Biden laptop story, solely to influence the 2020 election. The greatest offense was on behalf of the news media, the institution charged with holding the powerful to account.

The Aspen Institute’s Coaching of the Media

Journalist Matt Taibbi laid out in meticulous detail how the influential left-wing Aspen Institute, with events attended by members of every major news publication, coached the media on how to handle materials that would cast the Biden family in a negative light. Specifically, they advised journalists to “break” precedent established by the publication of the Pentagon Papers and “make the disinformation campaign as much a part of the story” as the newsworthy material itself.

• Focus on the why in addition to the what
• De-emphasize the importance of materials that would politically harm the Bidens
• Elevate the means by which the materials were obtained

And that’s exactly what they did when they refused to cover the story or otherwise dismiss it as Russian propaganda. That has never been the standard by which news is reported. Up until 2020, the standard was, “We got the goods, and for better or worse, here they are.”

The Hunter Laptop Bombshell

All of that changed with the Hunter laptop bombshell. Suddenly, the story at every major newspaper and network news channel wasn’t that Hunter had abandoned a computer full of unseemly and incriminating info, but that the means by which it was obtained were improper. It’s laughable. Every consequential story published by The New York Times and The Washington Post is the result of someone doing something illegal.

In any event, the contents of Hunter’s laptop weren’t even government secrets. They were sitting on an abandoned piece of hardware at a repair shop. Otherwise referred to by the intelligence community as “RUSSIAN DISINFORMATION!” That was another lie manufactured for the express purpose of protecting the Bidens and without an iota of evidence that would invalidate the Post’s reporting.

The Infamous 2020 “Former Intelligence Officials” Letter

The Washington Examiner reported on the infamous 2020 “former intelligence officials” letter, authored by Obama-era CIA official Michael Morell. At the time, Morell had said in an email to former CIA Director John Brennan that he was gathering names of intelligence community members to cast doubt on the Hunter laptop story because “We want to give the VP a talking point to use in response.”

Biden certainly used the talking point gift. In the second and final 2020 debate, Biden cited the letter, which was first published by Politico. “There are 50 former national intelligence folks who said that what he’s accusing me of is a Russian plant.”

The Change in Reporting Standards

To recap: Journalists were coached on how to shift the discussion away from newsworthy materials detrimental to a specific person (Biden) and focus instead on the means by which they were obtained. That’s exactly what they did, and the change in reporting standards was expressly made to tilt the election.

Eddie Scarry is a columnist for The Federalist.

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