I don’t know if folks remember how bad the smear campaign was about NY Post’s Hunter Biden laptop reporting was, so quick trip back down memory lane.
Beyond the full-court press from Twitter & Facebook, the media & Dems worked overtime to shut down the story. Look ⤵️
It’s worth starting with @CNN. They brought on James Clapper to call the scoop - confirmed today by Politico - “textbook Soviet Russian tradecraft.” @brianstelter had a program about how it was obviously fake. @apbenven had an “anatomy” of it.
Where’s the follow up, guys?
I mean, for crying out loud, @NPR went through the trouble of explaining why they weren’t going to report on the story!
Can we revisit that?
@MSNBC went all in on this. They had a member of Congress, @CongressmanRaja, on to spread misinformation about it being a “Russian influence operation.”
@kylegriffin1 said it “appears to contain disinformation”
All lies.
A lot of the original narrative was framed up by @politico, who ran a story that a bunch of former intel types disputed the findings (without seeing them, of course).
Today Politico announced that they had confirmed two of the key underlying details.
Might be a good time to update this fact check, @washingtonpost
There were a bunch of elected officials who repeated this bogus allegation. Here are just a few.
I want to pause to drive a point home: in the weeks leading up to an election, big tech, the Democrats and the corporate press worked together to bury a damaging story about one of the candidates, and they succeeded.
If you can shrug that off, I don’t know what’s wrong with you.
There were a ton of the usual suspects pushing this false narrative. I don’t have room for all of them but I wanted to point out some of the more egregious ones.
@joelockhart and @ThePlumLineGS, anything more from you guys? Still convinced it’s Russian disinformation?
And you, @McFaul? Do you still stand by your belief that this is a “hit piece so false that Twitter won’t even post it”? Or might there be something else afoot?
And I suspect @TVietor08 is right that folks haven’t learned the lessons of 2016, just wrong about what the lesson is.
Wherever Russian conspiracy theories go, the Never Trump crowd is rarely far behind.
Also worth pointing out: the smear here worked in both directions. Not only was Biden the blameless victim of supposed disinformation, but Trump was the reported bad guy pushing the (supposed) conspiracy theory.
Days before the presidential election between the two.
Quick addendum. @McFaul reminded me of a long thread he had on this subject, part explanation, part apology. Some of that is below.
A couple points:
First, I certainly don’t dispute that Russia actively uses disinformation to target the US. Or that Rudy Giuliani has proven himself an unreliable narrator, to put it mildly, when it comes to just about anything.
But he elides an important distinction here. It wasn’t that he “automatically questioned the veracity of [Giuliani’s] claims,” as he says.
He wrote those claims off completely as a malicious lie, helping feed into an effort to bury a real news story as “disinformation.”
As I’ve told him, I don’t expect I’ll be able to change his mind now that he‘s “MOVING ON FOREVER ON THIS!” but it’s obvious that he hasn’t actually taken any responsibility for helping to bury a since-verified, damaging story about the now-president days before his election.
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Biden’s disastrous debate performance brought to a screeching halt a multi-year campaign from the media to present the president as mentally fit.
Do you really remember how hard the press pushed you not to trust your lyin’ eyes on Biden’s decline?
Start here ⤵️
I suspect most of you remember the allegations from the White House that videos showing Biden behaving erratically were “cheap fakes.”
The media rushed to repeat this claim. Look at the extent @nytimes went to say you didn’t see anything and that Biden was fine.
Perhaps the wildest was @washingtonpost, who gave “Four Pinocchio’s” to videos showing Biden displaying cognitive problems, dismissing them as fakes, “pernicious” efforts “to reinforce an existing stereotype.”
Part of their defense was that Biden “doesn’t dance.”
You remember Russian Collusion. But do you remember the “Russian bounties” allegation, where the press ran with a conspiracy theory to make Trump look like a monster?
With the debate tonight, I think it’s timely to revisit a falsehood Biden pushed. Follow along ⤵️
It started with a scoop from @nytimes that claimed Russia had placed bounties on American soldiers in Afghanistan, that Trump knew about it, and he did nothing.
Days later, @washingtonpost followed up with the claim that these bounties—again, allegedly ignored by Trump—led to the deaths of American servicemen.
Do you *really* remember the Hunter Biden laptop story? I fear we’ve lost the plot.
With Hunter’s name in the news I wanted to revisit the extent to which the media went to cover up corruption allegations against—and at the behest of—his father.
Follow along. ⤵️
You have to start with the scoop from @nypost and @EmmaJoNYC.
Their lede from October was damning:
“Hunter Biden introduced his father, then-Vice President Joe Biden, to a top executive at a Ukrainian energy firm less than a year before the elder Biden pressured government officials in Ukraine into firing a prosecutor who was investigating the company.”
The story was fundamentally about Joe Biden’s alleged corruption. It was huge news, on the eve of an election.
The press leapt to claim the scoop wasn’t legit. And they reframed the issue: now it was about Hunter, not Joe. Here’s @NPR before/after
Good to see the NYT’s considerable resources being put to finding the truth in a debate between private citizens that led one of them to raise a flag upside down.
Real afflict the comfortable, comfort the afflicted stuff here.
It has only become “news” because of the pivot to left wing clickbait that Trump inspired among the press.
It’s politically inspired harassment and not only is it noxious it’s driving a deep animus among its target demo that is fraying what remains of the bounds of our body politic and society more broadly.
I’ve got an oldie-but-a-goodie for you from the archive of unhinged media coverage.
Do you remember how insane the coverage of Trump’s killing of Iranian Gen. Soleimani was?
I bet it’s worse than you remember. Follow along ⤵️
It all started with what I’ve gotta say might be the coldest presidential use of social media in history.
After ordering the strike that killed Iranian General Qaseem Soleimani, Trump tweeted out simply a picture of an American flag.
Many in the media went berserk.
First, the issue was directly with what Trump had done. Outlets claimed that he was rushing America into a war. @washingtonpost tried to point out the hypocrisy of a president who had said he would prevent a war.