New Year, Same Hunter Biden Derangement At The MRC

Posted on April 12, 2023

The Media Research Center began 2023 much the way it ended 2022 — so invested in trying to personally destroy Hunter Biden that one might call it a derangement syndrome. Indeed, the derangement started right on Jan. 1 with a post by Kevin Tober:

NBC’s was off to a bad start on their first program of the new year when moderator Chuck Todd went the entire hour on Sunday without mentioning Twitter’s suppression of Hunter Biden’s laptop during the 2020 presidential election, and in so doing rigged the election in favor of Joe Biden, as the Media Research Center has proven. Despite this omission during their hour-long program dedicated to the role of social media in our government and society, guest Jeh Johnson whined about the Russians using social media to “invade our American conversation.” 

[…]

“But this is an issue that we’ve really yet to get our arms around because it does implicate free speech,” he added. 

Yet Johnson apparently has no problem with Twitter suppressing the Hunter Biden laptop story during the 2020 presidential election. That had a much larger impact than anything Russian bots did in 2016.

In fact, the MRC has “proven” nothing beyond its financial ability to buy a couple biased polls, including one from Donald Trump’s own election pollster, upon which to build this conspiracy theory.

Two days later, Curtis Houck whined that the Hunter conspiracy wasn’t getting traction outside the right-wing media bubble:

Is Chris Licht interested in changing CNN or is he asleep at the wheel? Such was the case on Tuesday, during the coverage of the vote for speaker of the 118th Congress when it felt as though old puppetmaster Jeff Zucker were still in the control room, as so-called journalists smeared Republicans and wondered if voters actually want Congress to do anything about Hunter Biden’s life of corruption.

After State of the Union co-host Dana Bash lamented how Congress has been held hostage for “12, 15 years” by a “small band of extremes” in the GOP, her fellow co-host and The Lead host Jake Tapper tossed to outgoing Congressman Rodney Davis (R-IL) by similarly bemoaning the “ultra-right-wing, MAGA group…is, by the way, in some analyses, the reason why there wasn’t a red wave.”

Davis made a more general point about how “candidate quality matters” and has been an issue for multiple cycles, but then pivoted to insisting that, by holding up a Kevin McCarthy speakership, they’d put at risk their promises to voters “to hold Hunter Biden and Joe Biden accountable.”

Tapper snidely dismissed this: “You think that voters sent the Republican majority to the House of Representatives to hold Hunter Biden accountable?”

Earth to Jake, would that be the case to spend years talking about the Oath Keepers or Trump’s tax returns or Stormy Daniels?

Houck made no atempt to actually prove that the Hunter Biden story is important outside his partisan bubble.

Tim Graham spent a Jan. 16 post having a fit that the New York Times reported that “Republicans have yet to demonstrate that the senior Mr. Biden was involved in his son’s business deals or took any action to benefit him or his foreign partners,” huffing in response: “This is false, and Hunter Biden’s laptop had that information….if the leftist media hadn’t so aggressively squelched it before the 2020 election and argued it had all the hallmarks of Russian disinformation.” Despite this being purportedly indisputable, Graham offered no links to support his claim. He also complained that the Times pointed out that they were focusing on Hunter in order “to inflict damage on his father as he prepares for a likely 2024 re-election bid,” whining in response: “The Times is transparently in the business of Biden damage control. ” He didn’t dispute the accuracy of the statement.

Curtis Houck was mad that Hunter Biden’s team is fighting back in a Feb. 2 post:

On Thursday morning, NBC’s Today rediscovered Hunter Biden’s “much talked about laptop” (which in and of itself is comical for a liberal outlet to assert) in order to trumpet Hunter’s “aggressive new legal strategy” to force his father’s Justice Department and allies in Delaware law enforcement to open criminal investigations of those that shared and promoted its contents, which resulted in “a series of salacious and frankly damaging media stories”.

He went on to cite a right-wing website to claim that computer guy John Paul Mac Isaac had every right to rummage around Hunter’s laptop because it was abandoned property, “no different than someone dropping off their suits and never picking them up from the dry cleaners.”

Tober returned on Feb. 5 to whine that the Hunter story remained stuck in the right-wing bubble:

On Sunday’s edition of Fox News Channel’s MediaBuzz, frequent guest and NPR national political correspondent Mara Liasson said the quiet part out loud when she admitted that the lack of media coverage of Joe Biden’s crackhead son Hunter is not expected to change and as a result, the political calculus on whether the growing list of crimes Hunter is accused of is enough to hurt President Joe Biden isn’t expected to change either. 

This discussion arose because of the news this week about Hunter’s new lawyer who has sought to help the President’s delinquent son go on the offensive against the few media outlets who dare to cover his crimes.

[…]

It’s unclear whether this is a prediction on Liasson’s or a promise on her behalf. You can bet that if she has anything to say about it, she will continue to ignore the Hunter Biden laptop scandal at taxpayer-funded liberal National Public Radio (NPR). 

Tober claimed that Liasson was acting “petulant” when she said this, but he offered no proof of this claim.

The whining and lecturing continued throughout January and February, part of which involved complaints that coverage of the House Republicans’ hearing on the “Twitter files” didn’t focus solely on Hunter (and instead pointed out how Donald Trump tried to get Twitter to censor Chrissy Teigen calling him a “pussy ass bitch”):

And it wouldn’t be the MRC if it wasn’t trying to run up the numbers on purported Hunter scandals, so we have a Feb. 7 post by Geoffrey Dickens titled “10 Brand NEW Hunter Biden Breaking Stories the Nets Are Burying,” By our count — based on the articles claiming “new” scandals — the MRC wants you to believe there are at least 45 separate and distinct Hunter Biden “scandals,” which seems to defy logic.