Media Launch ‘Laptop from Hell’ Damage Control

Mario Tama, Jim Watson/Getty Images, BNN Edit
Mario Tama, Jim Watson/Getty Images, BNN Edit
Wendell Husebø

The establishment media continues to downplay the scandal of the Biden family business following Elon Musk’s release of the “Twitter Files,” which provided new insight into the censorship conspiracy surrounding the New York Post‘s reporting on Hunter Biden’s laptop.

On Friday, new details emerged from the Twitter Files of how the 2020 Biden campaign and the Democrat National Committee worked with Twitter to censor tweets they did not like about Hunter’s “laptop from Hell.” The revelations from the Twitter Files dominated the news cycle for the entire weekend.

But that did not stop the media from trying to tamp down interest in the revelations. The New Republic‘s Michael Tomasky published an article on Monday claiming the reporting was a minor development, and misrepresenting what was originally censored:

Congratulations to everyone who didn’t spend the weekend thinking about the president’s son’s junk.

What exactly is at the root of the right’s Hunter Biden obsession? At its simplest level, the Hunter saga is just a potential Achilles’ heel for a president they want to defeat in 2024, assuming Joe Biden runs.

…

But this weekend, things got even weirder—and in ways that were so sordid it took me a while to even understand what was going on.

The Washington Post’s Philip Bump contended Twitter’s initial censorship of the New York Post story on October 14, 2020, did not prevent Trump from winning the 2020 election — appearing to suggest that censorship was fine if it didn’t dictate an election result.

“One of the indefensible assertions that’s reemerged in recent days is that social media companies’ efforts to limit sharing of a New York Post story in October 2020 cost Donald Trump that year’s presidential election,” Bump claimed.

“So there is no way to say, for example, that a counterfactual in which Twitter didn’t limit sharing of the Post’s story about Joe Biden’s son Hunter’s laptop wouldn’t have moved Arizona from benefiting Biden by 10,500 votes to giving Trump a slight advantage,” he added.

CNN’s Dean Obeidallah tried to minimize the Twitter files in perhaps the most unusual way. He suggested on Monday the Twitter files were not the most important story from Friday. Rather, it was a New York Times article that claimed Twitter was allowing an “unprecedented” amount of hate speech on its platform:
But the Twitter story that demands coverage is not about something that happened more than two years ago but what we are seeing now on Twitter since Musk took control in October. There has been an “unprecedented” spike in hate speech as well as a resurgence of ISIS-linked accounts, The New York Times detailed in an article published Friday…”

That the Biden family business scandal is old news because it was “two years ago” was pushed not only by Obeidallah. White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre on Monday used the same tactic.

Jean-Pierre, who worked on the 2020 Biden campaign as a senior adviser, brushed off the Twitter Files as “old news” and “a distraction” during her press conference. “We see this as an interesting — or a coincidence, if I may, that he [Elon Musk] would so haphazardly, that Twitter would so haphazardly push this distraction that is full of old news,” she said.

Jean-Pierre never directly answered whether Twitter was correct to censor the 2020 New York Post story:

In 2018 and 2020, Breitbart Senior Contributor and Government Accountability Institute President Peter Schweizer published Secret Empires and Profiles in Corruption. Each book hit #1 on the New York Times bestseller list and exposed how Hunter Biden and Joe Biden flew aboard Air Force Two in 2013 to China before Hunter’s firm inked a $1.5 billion deal with a subsidiary of the Chinese government’s Bank of China less than two weeks after the trip. Schweizer’s work also uncovered the Biden family’s other vast and lucrative foreign deals and cronyism.

Breitbart Political Editor Emma-Jo Morris’s investigative work at the New York Post on the Hunter Biden “laptop from hell” also captured international headlines when she, along with Miranda Devine, revealed that Joe Biden was intimately involved in Hunter’s businesses, appearing to even have a 10 percent stake in a company the scion formed with officials at the highest levels of the Chinese Communist Party.

Follow Wendell Husebø on Twitter @WendellHusebø. He is the author of Politics of Slave Morality.

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