Hunter Biden’s Laptop and America’s Crisis of Accountability
March 21, 2022 2:39 PM   Subscribe

The New York Times now admits the story was real. News and social-media companies will pay no price for suppressing vital information in 2020. [previously]
posted by - (17 comments total)

This post was deleted for the following reason: Let's have a better-formed, better-explained FPP with links people can actually access -- Eyebrows McGee



 
Well, that’s certainly a pair of paywalled articles.
posted by a box and a stick and a string and a bear at 2:43 PM on March 21, 2022 [2 favorites]


Can you post some non-paywalled mirrors of the articles, please?
posted by LeRoienJaune at 2:43 PM on March 21, 2022


As I am wont to do, I will post a link to Philip Bump’s analysis of one facet of this at The Washington Post: “The forgotten — and ignored — context for the emergence of the Hunter Biden laptop story”:
In this article, we’ll only look at the overlap of the [question of how the information published by the New York Post purportedly get from Hunter Biden to the paper] and the [question of whether the media’s skepticism about the chain of custody and the information was warranted]: Was the sourcing for information sufficiently dubious to justify caution by mainstream outlets? The answer, it seems clear, is yes.
posted by Going To Maine at 2:46 PM on March 21, 2022 [1 favorite]


The WSJ editorial isn’t paywalled, I think. Of course, it’s also an editorial from the WSJ, so reading it won’t contain any surprises.
posted by Going To Maine at 2:47 PM on March 21, 2022 [1 favorite]


For everyone: a non-paywalled version of the NYT article
posted by Going To Maine at 2:49 PM on March 21, 2022 [2 favorites]


The WSJ editorial isn’t paywalled, I think.

It’s insisting that I subscribe to read more than the first two sentences.
posted by a box and a stick and a string and a bear at 2:51 PM on March 21, 2022


It's been an interesting week seeing Fox headlines about how none of the other networks see this as worthwhile news in the shadow of the war in Ukraine when it also managed to be largely unnewsworthy as an October surprise.
posted by Selena777 at 2:55 PM on March 21, 2022 [1 favorite]


vital information

What exactly was vital about it?
posted by The Notorious SRD at 3:01 PM on March 21, 2022 [2 favorites]


Putin propaganda. Consider the source.
posted by rikschell at 3:02 PM on March 21, 2022


Yeah, Hunter Biden certainly seems to have some issues but they don't seem any worse than any other politically connected person's kids. Biden himself has done as well as anyone at separating his family from his office.

This feels like counter programming for the article that came out last week about Thomas and his wife.
posted by kerwox at 3:04 PM on March 21, 2022 [3 favorites]


The WSJ editorial isn’t paywalled, I think.

It’s insisting that I subscribe to read more than the first two sentences.

Interesting - I’m not a subscriber and am not logged in yet I can read it - could be my ad blockers are taking care of it, could be something else. The internet is weird and broken today, I guess. The paywall breaks archive.org, alas. If you've got somewhere I can put a PDF, great.
posted by Going To Maine at 3:05 PM on March 21, 2022


What's the argument for this being "vital" information? Heck, what's the argument for it being "suppressed?" I knew a bunch about it despite trying to avoid it. A quick search of the NYT shows 34 articles that mention the Hunter Biden laptop between Oct 1 and Nov 15 of the 2020.

Is the argument just "The NYT should have given it six above the fold columns like they did for a content free letter about Hillary Clinton's e-mails?"

I have many complaints with the NYT, and admit it's interesting to wonder why at-the-time unconfirmed e-mails from a Democratic candidate's troubled son weren't trumpeted as the biggest story when similar things have triggered a feeding frenzy. But the problem with the coverage is not "too little emphasis on scandal" and I'd like some pitch why this should have gotten more coverage than it did. If anyone seriously thinks that.
posted by mark k at 3:05 PM on March 21, 2022 [10 favorites]


The New York Times now admits the story was real.

Which story? Apparently there is a story where Hunter Biden has had some sketchy business dealings and has been a tax cheat, but that absolutely was not "the story" about Hunter Biden in the 2020 election season. That story (to the extent that it was coherent enough to tell after the fact) was about how Hunter Biden conspired with Ukrainian officials to obstruct justice and maybe interfere in the 2016 Presidential campaign to sabotage Donald Trump, and the New York Times item linked absolutely does not support that story.

I am calling this OP title "bullshit."

Yes it sucks that Hunter Biden cheated on his taxes and trades on his connection with his father, but that is absolutely not what the Hunter Biden's laptop story was about. This is an expose of retail-scale corruption, and you could make a smoking hole in the earth where Hunter Biden's future used to be without doing a thing about the real crisis of accountability in America.
posted by Aardvark Cheeselog at 3:07 PM on March 21, 2022 [24 favorites]


The New York Times now admits the story was real.

Yeah, that "real" is doing a fuck of a lot of heavy lifting and implying, and the whole phrase has a nasty Fox News/OAN/NewsMax right wing tone to it.

Is "the story" "real" in the sense that a child of the rich & powerful used his family name and connections - even if just implied - to land sweet business deals and delay paying taxes as long as possible? Sure. Same as it ever was. Anyone remember Billy Beer?

Is it "real" in the sense that - as the right-wing media machine tried to portray it - it's evidence of vast intentional corruption on the part of the whole Biden family, and a massive coverup only revealed through the heroic efforts of a random unknown computer repair person with an incoherent story and some right-wing journalists, and evidence of Joe Biden being - somehow - unfit to hold office?

Fuuuuuuuck no.

Quit your bullshit.
posted by soundguy99 at 3:12 PM on March 21, 2022 [14 favorites]


To quote someone I have forgotten, I do not give a chicken-fried fuck about Hunter Biden, and no one else outside of the GOP sphere will either; and they have themselves to thank for that. American presidents traditionally have at least one sketchy relation, anyway, and any given one of Trump's get did worse things every day.
posted by Countess Elena at 3:13 PM on March 21, 2022 [4 favorites]


(For those who can’t read the op-ed, the argument is roughly, “this October surprise didn’t happen, surely because the NYT and others didn’t perform due diligence on it and dismissed it out of hand. [Ed.: No.] These newspapers depend on technology companies for information to report this story, so perhaps they are colluding in some ambiguous, non-specified way. 50 intelligence officials signed a letter at the saying that they believed the Hunter Biden story could be a Russian plant, and none of them regret signing that letter now. No wonder we’ve had lots of intelligence failures! Also, maybe they are colluding too?”)
posted by Going To Maine at 3:15 PM on March 21, 2022


If I'm remembering correctly, the "story" was also some nasty child porn allegations that don't appear to have been retroactively validated, so, um, fuck this.
posted by praemunire at 3:15 PM on March 21, 2022 [2 favorites]


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