Now that the presidential election is over, Politico’s reporter has admitted that many documents found on Hunter Biden’s laptop were authentic. This finding reverses the pre-election position of Politico, and is not a mere factoid. Rather, this admission corroborates Glenn Greenwald’s analysis and evidence that left-leaning media was corrupt and complicit with the deep state leading up to the election. In sum, reporters refused to do their jobs as reporters and it led to fake news. I used to hate that term, but I can no longer deny that large swathes of our “news” is concocted . . . fake (e.g., several years of hysterical fact-free reporting on alleged Trump-Russia connection). The motivation was always clear – – left-leaning legacy news outlets hated Trump and made it their mission to avoid four more years of Trump.
Do I need to repeatedly write that I voted for Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden and that I find Trump deranged, incompetent and dangerous? My concern in this post is not about who would make the better president. My concern is that the news media should always do its job, publishing important facts regardless of who the evidence helps or hurts, allowing the voters to decide what is important. The opposite of that happened regarding Hunter Biden’s laptop, part of a growing trend. In the new way of discussing important national issues, one denies or hides evidence that conflicts with one’s preferences. Proud and arrogant confirmation bias is the way many of us make decisions now, instead of relying on Enlightenment values. These are sad days, indeed. It reminds me of how we formerly ridiculed Pravda, the official newspaper of the communist party of the USSR.
Greenwald’s Tweet on the Politico reversal is the first of a long thread that makes an airtight case against the news media. I highly recommend the entire thread:
[Added March 17, 2022]
Dozens of “journalists” recklessly or intentionally got the Hunter Biden Laptop story completely wrong. Excellent long thread here by Tom Elliott:
Please tell me you are not surprised. I quit the Democratic Party in 2009 after 49 years when I realized it was primarily a criminal organization and the primary driver behind racism in America. Read the Moynihan Report. One of the greatest liberal thinkers of the 20th Century predicted today’s plight for the African-American community. The problem was the federal policy of discouraging a nuclear family among African Americans, with predictable results. Nearly all disparities in life outcomes are far better for children of two-parent households than for single-parent households. In fact, when Academia could no longer justify its ban on asking questions about other potential causes of unequal outcomes, the data were made available. When one corrects for number of parents in the young child’s home, outcome disparity between the races nearly disappears. They become almost the same between black and white in incarceration, education, employment, lifespan, health outcomes, pick a category, they’re nearly identical.
What is left over may be due to racism, and we all know it is real. It is not systemic, it is not disabling and it accounts for very little of the disparate outcomes. I’m enough older than you to recall the civil rights revolution. I marched, I went to sit-ins, I was spit on, beaten, hosed, not a fun time. We got the civil rights laws passed and the voting rights laws passed, then the most successful politician in US history entered the fray. LBJ, a confirmed racist, locked down the black vote for generations. He promised the self-anointed civil rights leaders a place at the table if they would sell their souls to the Democratic Party. Few people recall that; a good friend who is far more conservative than I will ever be, and who is black, had no knowledge of that history. Few younger than my 73 years recall it.
I’m told by authoritarians that I’m a racist because I reject white supremacy as the sole cause of all disparities. Under today’s standards, the accusation is all the proof needed. I’m told I’m a homophobe for objecting to the punishment imposed in the Oregon cake-baker case. The sentence was corporate death, bankruptcy. Surely we can differentiate between the harm caused by refusing to bake and decorate a cake, and the harm caused by refusing medical attention. No, anyone who disapproves is a homophobe. I support added immigration because we need it. Anyone who comes here wishing us no harm and who is not looking to exploit our charity needs to be admitted. We must first have control of our borders so we can do health screening and at least a minimum of screening for whether they constitute a threat. That means I hate foreigners.
Sorry, although I believe we should have gotten rid of Trump through constitutional means, that wasn’t good enough for Democrats. The only political campaign for which I ever volunteered was L. Douglas Wilder’s brief campaign for the Senate. But that’s a lie. How can a known white supremacist support a black man? I’m lying.
If you detect bitterness, this is the minimum.
Now the NYT admits that it was Hunter Biden’s Laptop. Now that a Presidential election is not at stake. First, here is an article from the National Review.
Next, Glenn Greenwald’s retrospective.