Censoring of The New York Post’s Hunter Biden scoop by Facebook and Google, and the decision by many mainstream media organisations to ignore the story, will help Donald Trump at the November 3 election.
The role of Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden’s son Hunter at Ukrainian gas company Burisma was the trigger for a call by Trump to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on July 25 last year. That call culminated in the failed impeachment of Trump.
We have known for years about the Bidens’ involvement in the Ukraine. When he was vice president to Barack Obama, Joe Biden pushed for the sacking of Ukrainian prosecutor general Viktor Shokin by threatening to pull $1bn in loan guarantees.
The Post’s emails also reveal damaging details of Hunter’s business interests in China after his father introduced him to senior Communist Party officials. Hunter flew with the vice president to China on Air Force Two in December 2013 for an eight-day visit with senior figures of the regime.
Add the failure of the Biden camp to deny the authenticity of emails taken from the hard drive of a computer left at a Delaware computer repair shop in April 2019 and the Post clearly had a good story. It has a lot more substance than the cooked up Russiagate hoax used by the left media and former Obama-era intelligence officials against Trump since his 2016 election.
Remember the salacious Christopher Steele allegations about Trump and prostitutes in a Moscow hotel. The Steele dossier was paid for by the Democratic National Committee. And Obama’s former director of national intelligence, James Clapper — the main source of Four Corners’ discredited three-part anti-Trump series, “The story of the century” — had already secretly testified to congress that he had in fact never seen any substantive evidence of collusion between Trump and Russia.
Now mainstream US media who swallowed all of Clapper’s claptrap are quoting him saying the story about the Biden emails has all the hallmarks of Russian espionage.
As Joe Aston suggested in The Australian Financial Review on Thursday, it’s a bit late for social media to worry about Russian hacking now after what the Russians and Ukrainians did in 2016. Yet out here the left media, led by the usual dupes at The Guardian and ABC, are defending the mainstream US media’s decision to avoid the Biden story. Pieces by Meg Simons (The Guardian) and Matt Bevan (ABC) missed the main point last week: the Bidens had not denied the authenticity of the emails.
The Post published comments by one of this column’s favourite writers on intelligence, Glenn Greenwald, who won a Pulitzer Prize in 2014 for breaking the Edward Snowden National Security Agency intelligence leaks story for The Guardian.
The Post on October 20 quoted a series of tweets from Greenwald: “Is there a single journalist willing to say with a straight face they believe the emails relating to the Bidens are either fabricated or otherwise altered, but the Bidens just aren’t saying so? There has to be some limits to your willingness to go in to bat for them.”
A founder of the online journal The Intercept, Greenwald wrote a lengthy piece there on October 16. As usual, he sticks with the facts: “The broad outlines of this story have long been known: Hunter was paid a very large monthly sum by Burisma at the same time that his father was quite active in using the force of the US Government to influence Ukraine’s internal affairs.”
Like this newspaper’s foreign editor Greg Sheridan, Greenwald was scathing of Facebook and Twitter for blocking the sharing of the Post’s revelations. “Imagine … if these two … giants united with Google to declare: henceforth we will ban all content that is critical of President Trump and/or the Republican Party, but will actively promote criticism of Joe Biden and the Democrats.” He was scathing of Democrats who had defended the tech giants’ censoring of the Post — free speech cannot be just for people you agree with.
Greenwald argues Twitter’s policy against linking to any hacked material could undermine some of the most important journalism ever done. “A large bulk of journalism is enabled by sources providing content without authorisation … the Pentagon papers, the WikiLeaks collateral murder video … the Snowden reporting, the Panama papers … relied on publication of various forms of ‘hacked materials’. The same is true of the DNC and Podesta emails.”
Facebook was an even bigger problem as the largest global news source, he wrote. “What makes Mark Zuckerberg’s social media company competent to ‘fact check’ the work of other journalists? Why did Facebook block none of the endless orgy of Russiagate conspiracy?”
We know why. Big tech leans left and many of its senior executives have worked for the Democrats. Yet that is precisely why the censoring of the Post’s stories could help Trump. Attempts to suppress the Biden stories will prove to many that everything Trump has been saying about the “Fake News Media” is true. And as an allegory for Washington influence peddling, it is hard to beat the personal greed revealed in the Post’s emails.
While published polling is still strong for Biden, the “shy conservative voter syndrome” is no doubt suppressing published Republican numbers. More interesting is a firming of support for Trump in the betting markets nationally. By week’s end he had firmed from a 30 per cent to a 40 per cent chance of winning. He is also firming in states he needs to win to secure electoral college votes.
In journalistic terms the suppression of the Post story again undermines trust in media. Why do journalists of the left who were happy to publish unsourced and unverified allegations that Trump was in league with the Russians now want infinite checking of allegations damaging to Biden? Remember, Trump in office did everything he could to blunt the policy thrusts of Vladimir Putin in the Ukraine, Venezuela and Iran, and with strengthening sanctions.
The left media have succumbed to the idea they should abandon notions of impartiality and balance, and should now be prepared to publish whatever it takes to damage Trump. This change in the norms of journalism has been driven by university media academics.
Stanford University professor of journalism Ted Glasser says journalists have to abandon objectivity and be advocates for social justice. Fellow Stanford academic Hakeem Jefferson says: “Journalists are so hellbent on being objective … they can’t tell the truth.”
The public does not agree.
Studies suggest voters are wary of the drift away from impartiality. A US survey of 20,000 by the Knight Foundation this year reports 84 per cent of Americans believe the news media is critical to a functioning democracy, and 92 per cent say it is important news media provide accurate and fair reports.
Yet a majority see “a great deal” (49 per cent) or a “fair amount” (36 per cent) of bias in the news source they rely on most.
Back to the Biden story. Good journalists need to be trusted to report accurately the successes and failures of leaders they support and those they oppose.
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