We’ve shown how the Media Research Center cranked up its Hunter Biden Derangement the day news of a plea deal was released. On the following day, June 21, the derangement continued. Kevin Tober complained that someone defended him:
Failed former Senator and MSNBC political analyst Claire McCaskill took the the airwaves on MSNBC’s Deadline: White House to tearfully lash out at Republicans for wanting to see equal justice under the law and see President Joe Biden’s son Hunter Biden prosecuted for all the crimes he has been credibly accused of. Instead of arguing for Hunter’s innocence based on the merits, she lashed out in an emotional rant about how mean Republicans are. Despite Hunter receiving a sweetheart plea deal from his father’s Justice Department, McCaskill still wasn’t happy.
“I don’t know what America they live in. And I don’t know how they sleep at night,” McCaskill proclaimed. “You know, alcoholism and addiction are probably the most pervasive diseases in America. I don’t know of one family that hasn’t been touched by the pain of these diseases. And it’s particularly painful when you have someone you love unconditionally that is suffering from these diseases.”
[…]It’s clear that McCaskill doesn’t follow the news. If she did, she would know that there’s plenty of evidence to file charges against Hunter Biden and eventually his father for their role in the Biden bribery scandal (among other crimes).
Tober actually called McCaskill a “failed senator” twice, presumably referring to her losing re-election. He would never call Donald Trump a “failed president” because he lost re-election.
Nicholas Fondacaro again called the plea deal “cushy” without offering evidence to back it up:
ABC’s Good Morning America was up in arms Wednesday morning over Republicans calling out what they understand was a two-tier justice system, one where President Biden’s son continued to benefit from the family name by getting a cushy plea deal on tax crimes and a felony gun charge. Chief White House Correspondent Mary Bruce whined Republicans didn’t care how “painful” this was for President Biden and chief legal analyst Dan Abrams absurdly suggested the Biden name led to harsher treatment.
When Abrams pointed out that the gun-related charge Biden faced is almost never charged by itself without an accompanying related crime, Fondacaro got defensive:
In reality, it’s a hard charge to prove in court. But Hunter had been very open about being using and being addicted to crack at the time he bought and owned his firearm, something rarely present in such cases.
And it’s a lie Hunter had to consciously make. The ATF’s Form 4473, which every gun buyer in America has to read and fill out before the background check and purchase can be completed, makes it known that lying on the form is a felony.
Fondacaro, of course, has consciously told many lies.
When MSNBC host Joe Scarborough pointed out how Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley said that “We aren’t interested in whether or not the accusations against Vice President Biden are accurate or not” and that the right-wing Wall Street Journal effectively said there was, in Scarborough’s words, “a lot of smoke butno fire” regarding Republican efforts to target Biden — making it clear that the real “witch hunt” was targeting Biden,not Trump, Mark Finkelstein went into defense mode:
In other words, far from Scarborough’s misrepresentation that Grassley said that there’s no evidence of wrongdoing, but that Republicans will go after Hunter regardless, Grassley’s point was the document he was demanding that FBI Director Chris Wray make public does contain accusations, but that Grassley would not prejudge it. That’s precisely the opposite of a witch hunt!
And Scarborough’s misrepresentation of the Wall Street Journal‘s editorial board column was even more egregious. Scarborough depicted it as concluding: smoke but no fire.
To the contrary, the editorial indicated that there was a ton of evidence pointing to illicit influence peddling by the Bidens. The headline set the tone: “The Biden Family Business—House report shows how Hunter and relatives profited while Joe was Vice President.”
[…]This was nothing less than a fraudulent misrepresentation of the facts by Scarborough. It reveals just how deep he was willing to sink in defense of Democrat political prospects.
Alex Christy grumbled that CNN did something the MRC does — word counts:
Senior political analyst John Avlon killed all irony on Tuesday’s CNN Tonight as he used some sketchy research to accuse Fox News of being obsessed with Hunter Biden. At the same time, Avlon sought to fact-check Republican claims that a legal double standard exists, but didn’t actually address the main point of the GOP’s allegations.
Avlon kicked off his “reality check” by declaring that “there’s a lot of doubling down on this idea of a legal double standard, especially in the wake of Donald Trump’s 37-count indictment. But does that stack up to the facts? Well, the investigation first was conducted by a Trump appointee, U.S. Attorney David Weiss of Delaware, specifically to reduce concern about politicized results.”
The man who works for the network that spent nearly 97 percent of Trump Indictment Day talking about Trump and mentioned him 191 times on May 25 alone accused Fox of being obsessed with Hunter, “But of course, Hunter Biden has been demonized by the right pretty thoroughly. To use just one measure? Get this, a LexisNexis search found that he was mentioned more than 2,200 times on Fox News between 2020 and 2022. For those doing the math at home, that’s well over once a day.”
From January 1, 2020, through December 31, 2022 is a time span of 1,095 days which means that Avlon’s definition of obsessive is two mentions per day. Two! Even worse, NewsBusters tried to reverse engineer CNN’s research and could not duplicate the results. A NewsBusters search of Nexus for Fox News transcripts yielded 2,045 mentions of “Hunter Biden” with each transcript providing for several mentions of Hunter.
At the same, NewsBusters searched CNN transcripts for mentions of “January 6th committee” during the same time span and found 2,374 results. NewsBusters also searched for Trump Jr.”, “Trump, Jr.”, and “Trump Junior” and got 2,440 results despite Donald Trump Jr. never being charged with a crime.
Christy didn’t explain why, exactly, Hunter should have been mentioned an average of twice a day every day for two years considering that, unlike Don Jr., he has not made himself a public figure. He also didn’t mention that a few weeks earllier, the MRC published a post by Bill D’Agostino claiming that “Trump was mentioned by name a whopping 399 times” in a 10-hour period on CNN and MSNBC — never mind that he’s the frontrunning Republican presidential candidate who adores seeing his name in the media and is facing myriad legal challenges. Still, D’Agostino complained that “it’s hard not to agree that the liberal TV news outlets still see him as a ratings gold mine” — something he will never say (out loud, anyway about Fox News’ obsession with Hunter.
Cassandra DeVries made the usual complaint that Republican obsession with Hunter was called out, playing whataboutism to deflect from it:
CNN This Morning criticized Republicans for spending too much time discussing Hunter Biden’s laptop this Wednesday. Political commentator Errol Louis claimed Americans did not care about President Biden’s son and his alleged crimes and said Republicans did not know how to talk to the country.
[…]Ironically, Louis’s criticism came amid extensive coverage of President Trump’s indictment by CNN, which also did not make this list of acceptable topics that interested voters. Yet, CNN still spent considerable time examining every possible angle of Trump’s case. Perhaps Louis forgot to add Trump’s legal problems to his list of relevant issues.
[…]Throughout his commentary, Louis made broad sweeping claims and conclusions about voters, Republicans, discussion-worthy topics, and political elections. CNN aired these claims as factual news, just as they ran with the Trump-Russia collusion hoax for four years, which was another topic the American people didn’t care about.
Previously, a Democratic president’s son charged with tax fraud and illegal firearm possession might negatively affect that president in the upcoming election. However, according to CNN, Hunter Biden’s charges instead demonstrate that Republicans are incompetent and out-of-touch. Thankfully, Errol Louis helped CNN viewers avoid that assumption.
Fondacaro and bill D’Agostino summarized all this in that day’s NewsBusters podcast:
As loud Italians, we sound off on Hunter getting away with a felony gun charge average Americans would be locked up for given the evidence, and call out CNN for their lazy research into Fox News coverage of Hunter’s scandals.
The weak punishment on the felony gun charge had me particularly hot under the collar as NewsBusters’ resident gun guy. I, along with other law-abiding gun owners take filling out the form and gun safety very seriously, so to see the federal government failing to throw the book at the President’s son tells us what the federal government thinks of its own laws.
We also call out ABC for doing the heavy lifting in terms of protecting the Biden administration and making the Biden family look like the victims. I point specifically to the work of chief White House correspondent Mary Bruce and chief Washington correspondent Jon Karl for downplaying the allegations against the Bidens, while tacitly (sometimes overtly) admitting to dubious behavior.
We’d believe Fondacaro’s complaint about “weak punishment” more if he and his co-workers didn’t labor so hard to defend Donald Trump every time he gets indicted.