The world renowned investigative Journalist Glenn Greenwald resigned
from the publication he founded, The Intercept, after he says it
censored his article about Hunter Biden.
What follows is Greenwald's note at the link below, plus the article that was censored.
https://greenwald.substack.com/p/article-on-joe-and-hunter-biden-censored
By Glenn Greenwald:
I am posting here the most recent draft of my article about Joe
and Hunter Biden — the last one seen by Intercept editors before telling
me that they refuse to publish it absent
major structural changes involving the removal of all sections critical
of Joe Biden, leaving only a narrow article critiquing media outlets. I
will also, in a separate post, publish all communications I had with
Intercept editors surrounding this article so you can see the censorship
in action and, given the Intercept’s denials, decide for yourselves
(this is the kind of transparency responsible journalists provide, and
which the Intercept refuses to this day to provide regarding their
conduct in the Reality Winner story). This draft obviously would have
gone through one more round of proof-reading and editing by me — to
shorten it, fix typos, etc — but it’s important for the integrity of the
claims to publish the draft in unchanged form that Intercept editors
last saw, and announced that they would not “edit” but completely gut as
a condition to publication:
TITLE: THE REAL SCANDAL: U.S. MEDIA USES FALSEHOODS TO DEFEND JOE BIDEN FROM HUNTER’S EMAILS
Publication by the New York Post two weeks ago of emails from Hunter Biden's laptop, relating to Vice President Joe Biden's work in Ukraine, and subsequent articles from other outlets concerning the Biden family's pursuit of business opportunities in China, provoked extraordinary efforts by a de facto union of media outlets, Silicon Valley giants and the intelligence community to suppress these stories.
One outcome is that the Biden campaign concluded, rationally, that
there is no need for the front-running presidential candidate to address
even the most basic and relevant questions raised by these materials.
Rather than condemn Biden for ignoring these questions -- the natural
instinct of a healthy press when it comes to a presidential election --
journalists have instead led the way in concocting excuses to justify
his silence.
After the Post’s first article, both that newspaper and other news
outlets have published numerous other emails and texts purportedly
written to and from Hunter reflecting his efforts to induce his father
to take actions as Vice President beneficial to the Ukrainian energy
company Burisma, on whose board of directors Hunter sat for a monthly
payment of $50,000, as well as proposals for lucrative business deals in
China that traded on his influence with his father.
Individuals included in some of the email chains have confirmed the contents' authenticity.
One of Hunter’s former business partners, Tony Bubolinski, has stepped
forward on the record to confirm the authenticity of many of the emails
and to insist that Hunter along with Joe Biden's brother Jim were
planning on including the former Vice President in at least one deal in
China. And GOP pollster Frank Luntz, who appeared in one of the
published email chains, appeared to confirm the authenticity as well, though he refused to answer follow-up questions about it.
Thus far, no proof has been offered by Bubolinski that Biden ever
consummated his participation in any of those discussed deals. The Wall
Street Journal says that
it found no corporate records reflecting that a deal was finalized and
that "text messages and emails related to the venture that were provided
to the Journal by Mr. Bobulinski, mainly from the spring and summer of
2017, don’t show either Hunter Biden or James Biden discussing a role
for Joe Biden in the venture."
But nobody claimed that any such deals had been consummated -- so the
conclusion that one had not been does not negate the story. Moreover,
some texts and emails whose authenticity has not been disputed state
that Hunter was adamant that any discussions about the involvement of
the Vice President be held only verbally and never put in writing.
Beyond that, the Journal's columnist Kimberly Strassel reviewed a stash of documentsand
"found correspondence corroborates and expands on emails recently
published by the New York Post," including ones where Hunter was
insisting that it was his connection to his father that was the greatest
asset sought by the Chinese conglomerate with whom they were
negotiating. The New York Times on Sunday reached a similar conclusion:
while no documents prove that such a deal was consummated, "records
produced by Mr. Bobulinski show that in 2017, Hunter Biden and James
Biden were involved in negotiations about a joint venture with a Chinese
energy and finance company called CEFC China Energy," and "make clear
that Hunter Biden saw the family name as a valuable asset, angrily
citing his 'family’s brand' as a reason he is valuable to the proposed
venture."
These documents also demonstrate, reported the Times, "that the
countries that Hunter Biden, James Biden and their associates planned to
target for deals overlapped with nations where Joe Biden had previously
been involved as vice president." Strassel noted that "a May 2017
'expectations' document shows Hunter receiving 20% of the equity in the
venture and holding another 10% for 'the big guy'—who Mr. Bobulinski
attests is Joe Biden." And the independent journalist Matt Taibbi published an articleon Sunday with ample documentation suggesting that Biden's attempt to replace a Ukranian prosecutor in 2015 benefited Burisma.
All of these new materials, the authenticity of which has never been
disputed by Hunter Biden or the Biden campaign, raise important
questions about whether the former Vice President and current
front-running presidential candidate was aware of efforts by his son to
peddle influence with the Vice President for profit, and also whether
the Vice President ever took actions in his official capacity with the
intention, at least in part, of benefitting his son's business
associates. But in the two weeks since the Post published its initial
story, a union of the nation's most powerful entities, including its
news media, have taken extraordinary steps to obscure and bury these
questions rather than try to provide answers to them.
The initial documents, claimed the New York Post, were obtained when
the laptops containing them were left at a Delaware repair shop with
water damage and never picked up, allowing the owner to access its
contents and then turn them over to both the FBI and a lawyer for Trump
advisor Rudy Giuliani. The repair store owner confirmed this narrative
in interviews with news outlets and then (under penalty of prosecution) to a Senate Committee; he also provided the receipt purportedly signed by Hunter. Neither Hunter nor the Biden campaign has denied these claims.
Publication of that initial New York Post story provoked a highly unusual censorship campaign by
Facebook and Twitter. Facebook, through a long-time former Democratic
Party operative, vowed to suppress the story pending its “fact-check,”
one that has as of yet produced no public conclusions. And while Twitter
CEO Jack Dorsey apologized for Twitter’s handling of the censorship
and reversed the policy that
led to the blocking of all links the story, the New York Post, the
nation’s fourth-largest newspaper, continues to be locked out of its
Twitter account, unable to post as the election approaches, for almost
two weeks.
After that initial censorship burst from Silicon Valley, whose workforce and oligarchs have donated almost entirely to
the Biden campaign, it was the nation's media outlets and former CIA
and other intelligence officials who took the lead in constructing
reasons why the story should be dismissed, or at least treated with
scorn. As usual for the Trump era, the theme that took center stage to
accomplish this goal was an unsubstantiated claim about the Kremlin
responsibility for the story.
Numerous news outlets, including the Intercept,
quickly cited a public letter signed by former CIA officials and other
agents of the security state claiming that the documents have the
“classic trademarks" of a “Russian disinformation” plot. But, as media
outlets and even intelligence agencies are now slowly admitting, no
evidence has ever been presented to corroborate this assertion. On
Friday, the New York Times reported that
“no concrete evidence has emerged that the laptop contains Russian
disinformation” and the paper said even the FBI has “acknowledged that
it had not found any Russian disinformation on the laptop.”
The Washington Post on Sunday published an op-ed --
by Thomas Rid, one of those centrists establishmentarian professors
whom media outlets routinely use to provide the facade of expert
approval for deranged conspiracy theories -- that contained this
extraordinary proclamation: "We must treat the Hunter Biden leaks as if
they were a foreign intelligence operation — even if they probably
aren't."
Even the letter from the former intelligence officials cited
by The Intercept and other outlets to insinuate that this was all part
of some “Russian disinformation” scheme explicitly admitted that “we do
not have evidence of Russian involvement,” though many media outlets
omitted that crucial acknowledgement when citing the letter in order to
disparage the story as a Kremlin plot: (See here)
Despite this complete lack of evidence, the Biden campaign adopted
this phrase used by intelligence officials and media outlets as its
mantra for why the materials should not be discussed and why they would
not answer basic questions about them. “I think we need to be very, very
clear that what he's doing here is amplifying Russian misinformation," said Biden
Deputy Campaign Manager Kate Bedingfield about the possibility that
Trump would raise the Biden emails at Thursday night’s debate. Biden’s
senior advisor Symone Sanders similarly warned on MSNBC:
“if the president decides to amplify these latest smears against the
vice president and his only living son, that is Russian disinformation."
The few mainstream journalists who tried merely to discuss these
materials have been vilified. For the crime of simply noting it on
Twitter that first day, New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman had her
name trend all morning along with the derogatory nickname “MAGA Haberman.” CBS News’ Bo Erickson was widely attacked even by his some in the media simply
for asking Biden what his response to the story was. And Biden himself
refused to answer, accusing Erickson of spreading a "smear."
That it is irresponsible and even unethical to mention these
documents became a pervasive view in mainstream journalism. The NPR
Public Editor, in an anazing statement representative
of much of the prevailing media mentality, explicitly justified NPR’s
refusal to cover the story on the ground that “we do not want to waste
our time on stories that are not really stories . . . [or] waste the
readers’ and listeners’ time on stories that are just pure
distractions.”
To justify her own show’s failure to cover the story, 60 Minutes’ Leslie Stahl resorted to an entirely different justification.
“It can’t be verified,” the CBS reporter claimed when confronted by
President Trump in an interview about her program’s failure to cover the
Hunter Biden documents. When Trump insisted there were multiple ways to
verify the materials on the laptop, Stahl simply repeated the same phrase: “it can’t be verified.”
After the final presidential debate on Thursday night, a CNN panel mocked the storyas
too complex and obscure for anyone to follow -- a self-fulfilling
prophecy given that, as the network's media reporter Brian Stelter noted with pride, the story has barely been mentioned either on CNN or MSNBC. As the New York Times noted on Friday:
"most viewers of CNN and MSNBC would not have heard much about the
unconfirmed Hunter Biden emails.... CNN’s mentions of “Hunter” peaked at
20 seconds and MSNBC’s at 24 seconds one day last week."
On Sunday, CNN's Christiane Amanpour barely pretended to be
interested in any journalism surrounding the story, scoffing during an
interview at requests from the RNC's Elizabeth Harrington to cover the
story and verify the documents by telling her: "We're not going to do
your work for you." Watch how the U.S.'s most mainstream journalists are
openly announcing their refusal to even consider what these documents
might reflect about the Democratic front-runner: https://youtu.be/oSB_fQHbSiA
These journalists are desperate not to know. As Taibbi wrote on Sunday about
this tawdry press spectacle: " The least curious people in the country
right now appear to be the credentialed news media, a situation normally
unique to tinpot authoritarian societies."
All of those excuses and pretexts — emanating largely from a national
media that is all but explicit in their eagerness for Biden to win —
served for the first week or more after the Post story to create a cone
of silence around this story and, to this very day, a protective shield
for Biden. As a result, the front-running presidential candidate knows
that he does not have to answer even the most basic questions about
these documents because most of the national press has already signaled
that they will not press him to do so; to the contrary, they will
concoct defenses on his behalf to avoid discussing it.
The relevant questions for Biden raised by this new reporting are as
glaring as they are important. Yet Biden has had to answer very few of
them yet because he has not been asked and, when he has, media outlets
have justified his refusal to answer rather than demand that he do so.
We submitted nine questions to his campaign about these documents that
the public has the absolute right to know, including:
- whether he claims any the emails or texts are fabricated (and, if so, which specific ones);
- whether he knows if Hunter did indeed drop off laptops at the Delaware repair store;
- whether Hunter ever asked him to meet with Burisma executives or whether he in fact did so;
- whether
Biden ever knew about business proposals in Ukraine or China being
pursued by his son and brother in which Biden was a proposed participant
and,
- how Biden could justify expending so much energy as Vice
President demanding that the Ukrainian General Prosecutor be fired, and
why the replacement — Yuriy Lutsenko, someone who had no experience in law;
was a crony of Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko; and himself had a
history of corruption allegations — was acceptable if Biden’s goal
really was to fight corruption in Ukraine rather than benefit Burisma or
control Ukrainian internal affairs for some other objective.
Though the Biden campaign indicated that they would respond to the Intercept’s questions, they have not done so. A statement they released to
other outlets contains no answers to any of these questions except to
claim that Biden “has never even considered being involved in business
with his family, nor in any business overseas.” To date, even as the
Biden campaign echoes the baseless claims of media outlets that anyone
discussing this story is “amplifying Russian disinformation,” neither
Hunter Biden nor the Biden campaign have even said whether they claim
the emails and other documents -- which they and the press continue to
label "Russian disinformation" -- are forgeries or whether they are
authentic.
The Biden campaign clearly believes it has no need to answer any of
these questions by virtue of a panoply of media excuses offered on its
behalf that collapse upon the most minimal scrutiny:
First, the claim that the material is of suspect
authenticity or cannot be verified -- the excuse used on behalf of Biden
by Leslie Stahl and Christiane Amanpour, among others -- is blatantly
false for numerous reasons. As someone who has reported similar large
archives in partnership with numerous media outlets around the world
(including the Snowden archive in 2014 and the Intercept’s Brazil Archive over the last year showing corruption by high-level Bolsonaro officials),
and who also covered the reporting of similar archives by other outlets
(the Panama Papers, the WikiLeaks war logs of 2010 and DNC/Podesta
emails of 2016), it is clear to me that the trove of documents from
Hunter Biden’s emails has been verified in ways quite similar to those.
With an archive of this size, one can never independently
authenticate every word in every last document unless the subject of the
reporting voluntarily confirms it in advance, which they rarely do.
What has been done with similar archives is journalists obtain enough
verification to create high levels of journalistic confidence in the
materials. Some of the materials provided by the source can be
independently confirmed, proving genuine access by the source to a hard
drive, a telephone, or a database. Other parties in email chains can
confirm the authenticity of the email or text conversations in which
they participated. One investigates non-public facts contained in the
documents to determine that they conform to what the documents reflect.
Technology specialists can examine the materials to ensure no signs of
forgeries are detected.
This is the process that enabled the largest and most established
media outlets around the world to report similar large archives obtained
without authorization. In those other cases, no media outlet was able
to verify every word of every document prior to publication. There was
no way to prove the negative that the source or someone else had not
altered or forged some of the material. That level of verification is
both unattainable and unnecessary. What is needed is substantial
evidence to create high confidence in the authentication process.
The Hunter Biden documents have at least as much verification as
those other archives that were widely reported. There are sources in the
email chains who have verified that the published emails are accurate.
The archive contains private photos and videos of Hunter whose
authenticity is not in doubt. A former business partner of Hunter has
stated, unequivocally and on the record, that not only are the emails
authentic but they describe events accurately, including proposed
participation by the former Vice President in at least one deal Hunter
and Jim Biden were pursuing in China. And, most importantly of all,
neither Hunter Biden nor the Biden campaign has even suggested, let
alone claimed, that a single email or text is fake.
Why is the failure of the Bidens to claim that these emails are
forged so significant? Because when journalists report on a massive
archive, they know that the most important event in the reporting's
authentication process comes when the subjects of the reporting have an
opportunity to deny that the materials are genuine. Of course that is
what someone would do if major media outlets were preparing to publish,
or in fact were publishing, fabricated or forged materials in their
names; they would say so in order to sow doubt about the materials if
not kill the credibility of the reporting.
The silence of the Bidens may not be dispositive on the question of
the material’s authenticity, but when added to the mountain of other
authentication evidence, it is quite convincing: at least equal to the
authentication evidence in other reporting on similarly large archives.
Second, the oft-repeated claim from news outlets and
CIA operatives that the published emails and texts were “Russian
disinformation” was, from the start, obviously baseless and reckless. No
evidence — literally none — has been presented to suggest involvement
by any Russians in the dissemination of these materials, let alone that
it was part of some official plot by Moscow. As always, anything is
possible — when one does not know for certain what the provenance of
materials is, nothing can be ruled out — but in journalism, evidence is
required before news outlets can validly start blaming some foreign
government for the release of information. And none has ever been
presented. Yet the claim that this was "Russian disinformation" was
published in countless news outlets, television broadcasts, and the
social media accounts of journalists, typically by pointing to the
evidence-free claims of ex-CIA officials.
Worse is the “disinformation” part of the media’s equation. How can
these materials constitute “disinformation” if they are authentic emails
and texts actually sent to and from Hunter Biden? The ease with which
news outlets that are supposed to be skeptical of evidence-free
pronouncements by the intelligence community instead printed their
assertions about "Russian disinformation" is alarming in the extreme.
But they did it because they instinctively wanted to find a reason to
justify ignoring the contents of these emails, so claiming that Russia
was behind it, and that the materials were "disinformation," became
their placeholder until they could figure out what else they should say
to justify ignoring these documents.
Third, the media rush to exonerate Biden on the
question of whether he engaged in corruption vis-a-vis Ukraine and
Burisma rested on what are, at best, factually dubious defenses of the
former Vice President. Much of this controversy centers on Biden's
aggressive efforts while Vice President in late 2015 to force the
Ukrainian government to fire its Chief Prosecutor, Viktor Shokhin, and
replace him with someone acceptable to the U.S., which turned out to be
Yuriy Lutsenko. These events are undisputed by virtue of a video of Biden boasting in
front of an audience of how he flew to Kiev and forced the Ukrainians
to fire Shokhin, upon pain of losing $1 billion in aid.
But two towering questions have long been prompted by these events,
and the recently published emails make them more urgent than ever: 1)
was the firing of the Ukrainian General Prosecutor such a high priority
for Biden as Vice President of the U.S. because of his son's highly
lucrative role on the board of Burisma, and 2) if that was not the
motive, why was it so important for Biden to dictate who the chief
prosecutor of Ukraine was?
The standard answer to the question about Biden's motive -- offered
both by Biden and his media defenders -- is that he, along with the IMF
and EU, wanted Shokhin fired because the U.S. and its allies were eager
to clean up Ukraine, and they viewed Shokhin as insufficiently vigilant
in fighting corruption.
“Biden’s brief was to sweet-talk and jawbone Poroshenko into making
reforms that Ukraine’s Western benefactors wanted to see as,” wrote the Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler in
what the Post calls a “fact-check.” Kessler also endorsed the key
defense of Biden: that the firing of Shokhin was bad for Burima, not
good for it. “The United States viewed [Shokhin] as ineffective and
beholden to Poroshenko and Ukraine’s corrupt oligarchs. In particular,
Shokin had failed to pursue an investigation of the founder of Burisma,
Mykola Zlochevsky,” Kessler claims.
But that claim does not even pass the laugh test. The U.S. and its
European allies are not opposed to corruption by their puppet regimes.
They are allies with the most corrupt regimes on the planet, from Riyadh
to Cairo, and always have been. Since when does the U.S. devote itself
to ensuring good government in the nations it is trying to control? If
anything, allowing corruption to flourish has been a key tool in
enabling the U.S. to exert power in other countries and to open up their
markets to U.S. companies.
Beyond that, if increasing prosecutorial independence and
strengthening anti-corruption vigilance were really Biden's goal in
working to demand the firing of the Ukrainian chief prosecutor, why
would the successor to Shokhin, Yuriy Lutsenko, possibly be acceptable?
Lutsenko, after all, had "no legal background as general prosecutor,"
was principally known only as a lackey of Ukrainian President Petro
Poroshenko, was forced in 2009 to "resign as interior minister after
being detained by police at Frankfurt airport for being drunk and
disorderly," and "was subsequently jailed for embezzlement and abuse of
office, though his defenders said the sentence was politically
motivated."
Is it remotely convincing to you that Biden would have accepted
someone like Lutsenko if his motive really were to fortify
anti-corruption prosecutions in Ukraine? Yet that's exactly what Biden
did: he personally told Poroshenko that Lutsenko was an acceptable
alternative and promptly released the $1 billion after his appointment
was announced. Whatever Biden's motive was in using his power as U.S.
Vice President to change the prosecutor in Ukraine, his acceptance of
someone like Lutsenko strongly suggests that combatting Ukrainian
corruption was not it.
As for the other claim on which Biden and his media allies have
heavily relied — that firing Shokhin was not a favor for Burisma because
Shokhin was not pursuing any investigations against Burisma — the
evidence does not justify that assertion.
It is true that no evidence, including these new emails, constitute
proof that Biden's motive in demanding Shokhin's termination was to
benefit Burisma. But nothing demonstrates that Shokhin was impeding
investigations into Burisma. Indeed, the New York Times in 2019 published one of the most comprehensive investigations to
date of the claims made in defense of Biden when it comes to Ukraine
and the firing of this prosecutor, and, while noting that "no evidence
has surfaced that the former vice president intentionally tried to help
his son by pressing for the prosecutor general’s dismissal," this is
what its reporters concluded about Shokhin and Burisma:
[Biden's] pressure campaign
eventually worked. The prosecutor general, long a target of criticism
from other Western nations and international lenders, was voted out months later by the Ukrainian Parliament.
Among those who had a stake in the outcome was Hunter Biden, Mr. Biden’s younger son, who at the time was on the board of an energy company owned by a Ukrainian oligarch who had been in the sights of the fired prosecutor general.
The Times added: "Mr. Shokhin’s office had oversight of
investigations into [Burisma's billionaire founder] Zlochevsky and his
businesses, including Burisma." By contrast, they said, Lutsenko, the
replacement approved by Vice President Biden, "initially continued
investigating Mr. Zlochevsky and Burisma, but cleared him of all charges
within 10 months of taking office."
So whether or not it was Biden's intention to confer benefits on
Burisma by demanding Shokhin's firing, it ended up quite favorable for
Burisma given that the utterly inexperienced Lutesenko "cleared
[Burisma's founder] of all charges within 10 months of taking office."
The new comprehensive report from journalist Taibbi on Sunday also
strongly supports the view that there were clear antagonisms between
Shokhin and Burisma, such that firing the Ukrainian prosecutor would
have been beneficial for Burisma. Taibbi, who reported for many years
while based in Russia and remains very well-sourced in the region,
detailed:
For all the negative press about
Shokhin, there’s no doubt that there were multiple active cases
involving Zlochevsky/Burisma during his short tenure. This was even once
admitted by American reporters, before it became taboo to describe such
cases untethered to words like “dormant.” Here’s how Ken Vogel at the New York Times put it in May of 2019:
"When
Mr. Shokhin became prosecutor general in February 2015, he inherited
several investigations into the company and Mr. Zlochevsky, including
for suspicion of tax evasion and money laundering. Mr. Shokin also
opened an investigation into the granting of lucrative gas licenses to
companies owned by Mr. Zlochevsky when he was the head of the Ukrainian
Ministry of Ecology and Natural Resources."
Ukrainian officials I reached this week confirmed that multiple cases were active during that time.
“There
were different numbers, but from 7 to 14,” says Serhii Horbatiuk,
former head of the special investigations department for the Prosecutor
General’s Office, when asked how many Burisma cases there were.
“There
may have been two to three episodes combined, and some have already
been closed, so I don't know the exact amount." But, Horbatiuk insists,
there were many cases, most of them technically started under Yarema,
but at least active under Shokin.
The numbers quoted by Horbatiuk
gibe with those offered by more recent General Prosecutor Rulsan
Ryaboshapka, who last year said there were at one time or another “13 or 14” cases in existence involving Burisma or Zlochevsky.
Taibbi reviews real-time reporting in both Ukraine and the U.S. to
document several other pending investigations against Burisma and
Zlochevsky that was overseen by the prosecutor whose firing Biden
demanded. He notes that Shokhin himself has repeatedly said he was
pursuing several investigations against Zlochevsky at the time Biden
demanded his firing. In sum, Taibbi concludes, "one can’t say there’s no
evidence of active Burisma cases even during the last days of Shokin,
who says that it was the February, 2016 seizure order [against
Zlochevsky's assets] that got him fired."
And, Taibbi notes, "the story looks even odder when one wonders why
the United States would exercise so much foreign policy muscle to get
Shokin fired, only to allow in a replacement — Yuri Lutsenko — who by
all accounts was a spectacularly bigger failure in the battle against
corruption in general, and Zlochevsky in particular." In sum: "it’s
unquestionable that the cases against Burisma were all closed by
Shokin’s successor, chosen in consultation with Joe Biden, whose son
remained on the board of said company for three more years, earning
upwards of $50,000 per month."
The publicly known facts, augmented by the recent emails, texts and
on-the-record accounts, suggest serious sleaze by Joe Biden’s son Hunter
in trying to peddle his influence with the Vice President for profit.
But they also raise real questions about whether Joe Biden knew about
and even himself engaged in a form of legalized corruption.
Specifically, these newly revealed information suggest Biden was using
his power to benefit his son’s business Ukrainian associates, and
allowing his name to be traded on while Vice President for his son and
brother to pursue business opportunities in China. These are questions
which a minimally healthy press would want answered, not buried —
regardless of how many similar or worse scandals the Trump family has.
But the real scandal that has been proven is not the former Vice
President’s misconduct but that of his supporters and allies in the U.S.
media. As Taibbi’s headline put it: “With the Hunter Biden Exposé,
Suppression is a Bigger Scandal Than the Actual Story.”
The reality is the U.S. press has been planning for this moment for
four years — cooking up justifications for refusing to report on
newsworthy material that might help Donald Trump get re-elected. One
major factor is the undeniable truth that journalists with national
outlets based in New York, Washington and West Coast cities
overwhelmingly not just favor Joe Biden but are desperate to see Donald
Trump defeated.
It takes an enormous amount of gullibility to believe that any humans
are capable of separating such an intense partisan preference from
their journalistic judgment. Many barely even bother to pretend:
critiques of Joe Biden are often attacked first not by Biden campaign
operatives but by political reporters at national news outlets who make
little secret of their eagerness to help Biden win.
But much of this has to do with the fallout from the 2016 election.
During that campaign, news outlets, including The Intercept, did their
jobs as journalists by reporting on the contents of newsworthy,
authentic documents: namely, the emails published by WikiLeaks from the
John Podesta and DNC inboxes which, among other things, revealed
corruption so severe that it forced the resignation of the top five
officials of the DNC. That the materials were hacked, and that
intelligence agencies were suggesting Russia was responsible, not negate
the newsworthiness of the documents, which is why media outlets across
the country repeatedly reported on their contents.
Nonetheless, journalists have spent four years being attacked as
Trump enablers in their overwhelmingly Democratic and liberal cultural
circles: the cities in which they live are overwhelmingly Democratic,
and their demographic — large-city, college-educated professionals — has
vanishingly little Trump support. A New York Times survey of campaign data from Monday tells just a part of this story of cultural insularity and homogeniety:
Joe Biden has outraised President
Trump on the strength of some of the wealthiest and most educated ZIP
codes in the United States, running up the fund-raising score in cities
and suburbs so resoundingly that he collected more money than Mr. Trump
on all but two days in the last two months....It is not just that much
of Mr. Biden’s strongest support comes overwhelmingly from the two
coasts, which it does.... [U]nder Mr. Trump, Republicans have
hemorrhaged support from white voters with college degrees. In ZIP codes
with a median household income of at least $100,000, Mr. Biden smashed
Mr. Trump in fund-raising, $486 million to only $167 million —
accounting for almost his entire financial edge....One Upper West Side
ZIP code — 10024 — accounted for more than $8 million for Mr. Biden, and
New York City in total delivered $85.6 million for him — more than he
raised in every state other than California....
The median
household in the United States was $68,703 in 2019. In ZIP codes above
that level, Mr. Biden outraised Mr. Trump by $389.1 million. Below that
level, Mr. Trump was actually ahead by $53.4 million.
Wanting to avoid a repeat of feeling scorn and shunning in their own
extremely pro-Democratic, anti-Trump circles, national media outlets
have spent four years inventing standards for election-year reporting on
hacked materials that never previously existed and that are utterly
anathema to the core journalistic function. The Washington Post's
Executive Editor Marty Baron, for instance, issued a memo full
of cautions about how Post reporters should, or should not, discuss
hacked materials even if their authenticity is not in doubt.
That a media outlet should even consider refraining from reporting on
materials they know to be authentic and in the public interest because
of questions about their provenance is the opposite of how journalism
has been practiced. In the days before the 2016 election, for instance,
the New York Times received by mail one year of Donald Trump's tax
returns and -- despite having no idea who sent it to them or how that person obtained it: was is stolen or hacked by a foreign power? -- the Times reported on its contents.
When asked by NPR why they would report on documents when they do not
know the source let alone the source's motives in providing them,
two-time Pulitzer Prize winner David Barstow compellingly explained what
had always been the core principle of journalism: namely, a journalist
only cares about two questions -- (1) are documents authentic and (2)
are they in the public interest? -- but does not care about what motives
a source has in providing the documents or how they were obtained when
deciding whether to reporting them: https://twitter.com/mikiebarb/status/783379164409847808
The U.S. media often laments that people have lost faith in its
pronouncements, that they are increasingly viewed as untrustworthy and
that many people view Fake News sites are more reliable than established
news outlets. They are good at complaining about this, but very bad at
asking whether any of their own conduct is responsible for it.
A media outlet that renounces its core function -- pursuing answers
to relevant questions about powerful people -- is one that deserves to
lose the public's faith and confidence. And that is exactly what the
U.S. media, with some exceptions, attempted to do with this story: they
took the lead not in investigating these documents but in concocting
excuses for why they should be ignored.
As my colleague Lee Fang put it on Sunday:
"The partisan double standards in the media are mind boggling this
year, and much of the supposedly left independent media is just as
cowardly and conformist as the mainstream corporate media. Everyone is
reading the room and acting out of fear." Discussing his story from
Sunday, Taibbi summed up the
most important point this way: "The whole point is that the press loses
its way when it cares more about who benefits from information than
whether it's true."
