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.
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
Do you remember the media meltdown over Trump’s pardons? As Biden hands out decades-long passes to his family and friends, that concern is nowhere to be seen.
Biden no doubt wants you to forget this outrage in the glow of the inaugural.
Don’t. Screenshots help. ⤵️
When Trump announced pardons late in his first term, @nytimes said it “showed his willingness to use his power aggressively on behalf of loyalists” to “override courts, juries and prosecutors to apply his own standard of justice for his allies.”
When Biden did the same thing, @nytimes said he was using his “power to protect people targeted by…Trump” to “head off politically driven prosecutions.”
In honor of my securing the top spot on @StuDoesAmerica’s most frequent guests list, I wanted to highlight perhaps my favorite appearance: breaking down the media’s lovefest with former Gov Andrew Cuomo as he was killing countless New Yorkers.
The biggest media story of Biden’s time in office is how the press covered up his cognitive decline…right up until he became a disastrous political liability for Democrats.
Wanna know why people don’t trust the corporate press? Look at these side by sides ⤵️
It’s stunning the pace with which the media narrative shifted.
In 3 weeks time, @washingtonpost went from blaming “cheapfake” videos misleading audiences as the cause of concern around Biden to a headline that even foreign officials were alarmed by Biden’s “accelerating” aging.
Where was the @washingtonpost for those three weeks between ‘four Pinocchios for this lie, we all know Biden doesn’t dance!’ to “Biden has slowed considerably over the last several months.”
The gov’t finally released pictures of Biden with his son Hunter’s business partners.
You may remember the corporate press alleging for years that there’s no evidence Biden had any contact with Hunter’s shady businesses.
I think some corrections are in order. ⤵️
For years, the corporate press ran cover for claims that President Biden wasn’t involved in Hunter’s unsavory business dealings, particularly with foreign governments.
That was all a sham.
I think @nytimes should correct the record now that we know their reporting is false.
If this story is worth reporting on — and it appears that @washingtonpost thought it was, at least when the narrative helped Democrats — then it should be worth following up when we get new information that makes clear the Post reported in error.
Biden’s pardoning of his son Hunter says an enormous amount about the president’s views of justice.
But it also says a lot about the willingness of the mainstream media—the nation’s noble fact checking corps—to repeat bogus claims that suit Democrats.
Remember? ⤵️
For starters, let’s revisit the coverage of how Biden wouldn’t do what he just did.
Biden said he wouldn’t pardon his son, no way. He would trust our legal system.
The media repeated it at every turn, without a shred of incredulity.
Here’s @washingtonpost
Seemingly every outlet did the same. @CNN had a couple of my favorites.
Look at the lede in on this first one.
The media’s job isn’t to simply repeat what politicians tell them. Whatever happened to “defenders of our democracy” and all that?