National Review Online
Thursday, October 22, 2020
In an interview with National Public Radio’s public
editor today, Terence Samuel, managing editor for news, explained why readers
haven’t seen any stories about the New York Post’s Hunter Biden email
scoop.
“We don’t want to waste our time on stories that are not
really stories, and we don’t want to waste the listeners’ and readers’ time on
stories that are just pure distractions,” Samuel reasoned. “And quite frankly,
that’s where we ended up, this was . . . a politically driven event and we
decided to treat it that way.”
Samuel, sadly, speaks for much of the media, which has
ignored or dismissed the emails out of hand. In her 60 Minutes interview
with the president (released preemptively by the White House), Lesley Stahl
vigorously denies that Joe Biden is in the midst of a scandal. When the New
York Post story broke, the New York Times immediately followed up —
with a piece on the Post’s reporting.
For his part, Samuel fails to explain what journalistic
standards he employs to ascertain what does and doesn’t constitute a “waste of
time.” The New York Post’s reporting, after all, has now been
corroborated by an on-the record source, Tony Bobulinski, a former Hunter Biden
business partner and Navy veteran. The emails that Bobulinski says are
“genuine” purport to detail a business arrangement in which the Biden family
“aggressively leveraged the Biden family name to make millions” from foreign entities.
How is that “not really a story?”
There is more and more reason to credit the veracity of
those emails, or at a minimum, suggest that they warrant more thorough
investigation. We have what appears to be a signed receipt from the computer
repair shop in Delaware, demonstrating that Hunter’s laptop and hard drive were
obtained legally. We know that the laptop in question is being held in
connection to an FBI money-laundering investigation. The director of national
intelligence, John Ratcliffe, says that the emails in questions aren’t part of
a Russian disinformation campaign and the FBI hasn’t contradicted him.
Yet, the managing editor of one of the nation’s largest
publicly funded media organization believes emails possibly implicating a
presidential frontrunner in having benefitted from deals involving his shady
son who was leveraging the family name and proximity to power for millions are
nothing but a distraction. Nobody would apply that standard to stories about
influence-peddling, foreign contacts, or foreign financial interests on the
part of Donald Trump’s family — nor should they. To the contrary, not only has
the press properly treated Trump family business interests as newsworthy, they
have frequently disregarded even the most minimal journalistic standards to
issue breathless reports about them.
In contemporary media parlance, “distraction,” like “Russian
disinformation,” is a euphemism for any story that harms the prospects of the
Biden candidacy. Too many journalists seem to live in terror of being blamed
for reporting stories that might influence voters to reelect Donald Trump. As
of this writing, National Public Radio is running headlines such as, “Here’s
Where The Threat Of Militia Activity Around The Elections Is The Highest” and
“‘Borat’ Sequel Grabs A Political News Cycle — At Least Momentarily.” Surely
NPR’s audience could handle a careful explanation of why Hunter Biden’s laptop
held emails and texts alleging that his father, the Democratic Party’s
presidential nominee, was taking a 10 percent cut from energy deals involving
the Chinese communists.
Of course, National Public Radio is free to cover
whatever news it deems important. But if it runs interference for the preferred
presidential candidate of the editors, it should do so without the $250 million
provided by taxpayers every year. As it is, NPR programming largely caters to
sensibilities of the urban liberals. And that demographic happens to have the
financial resources to ensure that NPR remains a vibrant source of left-wing
news and entertainment without the federal government chipping in.
Until that time, however, taxpayers have every right to
expect organizations such as NPR hold the powerful accountable without partisan
favor — and that goes for both Donald Trump and Joe Biden.
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