The Media Research Center spent the first day of Hunter Biden’s trial obsessing over his laptop. The second day of the trial started with a June 5 post by Geoffrey Dickens ranting about something that had nothing to do with the trial:
While there has been network coverage (full of spin) of the Hunter Biden gun trial there have been and will continue to be certain newsworthy items they won’t tell you about. We will be using this space in the coming days to alert you to those developments.
Today we begin with the story of how Hunter Biden has blown threw so much of his benefactor Kevin Morris’s (AKA “Sugar Brother”) money that Morris’s daughter has complained about it.
Up until recently the Hollywood millionaire Morris had been covering Hunter’s legal fees but apparently he’s now “tapped out” of funds. It got so bad that Morris’s 23-year old daughter allegedly confronted Hunter face-to-face and scolded him: “stop taking advantage of my father.”
Amount of coverage on ABC, CBS, NBC evening and morning shows? 0 seconds.
This is just the latest example of the Big Three networks running damage control for Hunter and the Biden family.
As if Dickens and the MRC aren’t full of their own anti-Hunter spin.
Curtis Houck served up another “trial watch” item in which he again whined that non-right-wing networks treated Hunter like a human being:
On Wednesday morning, the “big three” of ABC, CBS, and NBC continued to surprisingly give full segment to the Hunter Biden trial, but this left the overall tally at 37 minutes (37:11) versus the 71 minutes (70:43) at this point in the Trump trial. On the substance, they all casually brought up Hunter Biden’s “controversial” laptop despite years of either denying its existence or brushing it aside.
ABC’s Good Morning America again had senior national correspondent Terry Moran provide helpings of pathetic sympathy for these supposedly downtrodden Bidens: “Because Hunter Biden is the President’s son, this case is seen as political by many, but for the Biden family, who so many American families have been caught up in the world with drug abuse and guns, this is personal and painful.”
Like the CBS and NBC would, Moran brought up Hunter’s relationship with his late brother Beau’s widow Hallie, but ignored how that caused his first marriage to fall apart to Kathleen Buhle.
Houck, however, failed to document Fox News’ trial coverage, even though it would have been useful for him to show how he thinks the trial should be covered (since it’s official MRC policy never to admit Fox News does anything wrong).
Michael Wnek grumbled that someone committed the offense of expressing sympathy for Hunter:
On Tuesday evening, MSNBC’s All In host Chris Hayes ranted about Hunter Biden’s trial, deciding that he was the target of a “draconian” prosecution. He also downplayed Biden’s alleged crime and sympathized with his “supportive” family, not even attempting to hide his partisan sentiments and presenting the whole situation as a great injustice.
Hayes began: “The current president of the United States, Joe Biden, and his First Lady, are quietly watching their last living son, Hunter, be prosecuted by the Biden Department of Justice.”
Questioning the legitimacy of the prosecutor, David Weiss, Hayes pointed to his position as a Trump Administration holdover and argued that he had overseen the case for far too long, i.e. five years. With this in mind, Hayes falsely depicted Biden as the victim of a vague and unsubstantial accusation: “The result is that Hunter Biden, who has been targeted for Republican conspiracy theories for the better part of a decade and endless hearings and the like, is now being prosecuted by the Department of Justice, in the person of David Weiss, for an incredibly arcane, alleged offense.”
In reality, the crime was quite straightforward and in Hayes’s own words, “Hunter Biden purchased a handgun in 2018, he lied on the federal form when he said he had not abused drugs.”
To support his claim of the ludicrous nature of the trial, he cited the supposedly disproportionate sentence Biden faced. “He possessed that handgun for, wait for it, 11 days. He lied on the form about his drug use. He had the handgun for 11 days. He now faces 25 years in prison,” Hayes scoffed.
The irony of his indignation as a host on MSNBC, which has been famously pro-gun control, was especially fascinating. Furthermore, Biden’s possession of the gun for a mere 11 days still exceeded the waiting periods in many states, including California, Washington State, as well as Washington, D.C., all of which seek to implement liberal pipe dreams for gun control.
Houck had another Fox News-less summary on June 6, which involved a lot of whining that non-right-wing coverage was diminishing:
ABC’s Good Morning America bid farewell Thursday to the first Hunter Biden trial (at least for now) with zero mentions during their news show ahead of what would be a critical day of testimony for the prosecution by Hunter’s former love/late brother Beau’s widow Hallie Biden. CBS Mornings and NBC’s Today, in contrast, still had full stories with the latter even conceding Biden’s only hope to evade guilty is sympathetic juror.
The coverage disparity from the Trump trial only widened with 49 minutes and 14 seconds since Monday on the network morning and evening shows compared to 74 minutes and 31 seconds at this point in the Trump trial.
Again, Houck refused to offer a coverage count for Fox News despite its usefulness to his comparison posts. P.J. Gladnick served up another laptop-obsessed post:
As some media outlets, albeit reluctantly, are finally admitting in their coverage of the Hunter Biden gun trial that the “Laptop From Hell” is real and not the result of Russian disinformation, a main source of that fake news story in 2020, Politico, is now avoiding its own highly embarrassing role in promoting the now discredited conspiracy theory. Perhaps Josh Gerstein and Betsy Woodruff Swan hoped we wouldn’t notice their attempt to deflect responsibility from Politico on Tuesday in “Prosecutors open their case against Hunter Biden by playing his own voice for the jury.”
Buried deep, deep down in their story — about 30 paragraphs deep — was this paragraph with the responsibility-deflection twist:
Jurors also saw first-hand the infamous laptop that Biden allegedly dropped off at a Delaware repair shop and never retrieved. The disclosure of its contents, including photos of Biden with drugs and in hotel rooms with women, caused a major dust-up in the 2020 presidential race, as Democrats insisted it was likely Russian propaganda and discussion about it was suppressed on social media sites.
“Democrats insisted it was likely Russian propaganda and discussion about it was suppressed on social media sites.” And who, pray tell, was at the forefront of giving the Democrats justification to promote the laptop disinformation as well as justification for social media sites to suppress the story? Why, none other than Politico itself.
As we’ve noted, there was no reason to trust anything at face value from the right-wing pro-Trump rag that initially pushed the laptop, and it offered no independent verification at the time that would have made anyone outside the right-wing bubble believe the story, and there was every reason to suspect it was disinformation.
Sarah Butler complained in another June 6 post that Hunter’s addiction issues were a reasonable defense:
On Wednesday, The Lead with Jake Tapper tried to argue that Hunter Biden held no liability for lying on his federal Firearm Transaction Record form because of how far “gone” on drugs he allegedly was when he bought his gun in 2018.
Victoria Nourse, former Chief Counsel for the then-Vice President Joe Biden, leaned on two statutes which would lead to the same outcome where Hunter Biden is found not guilty. Nourse alluded to the Fifth Circuit which concluded that disarming a sober citizen based primarily on past drug usage violated the Second Amendment.
[…]Tapper noted how members of the jury have stated that they or somebody they know has been affected by addiction. He asked Tim Parlatore, CNN Legal Commentator, if these jurors could be effective when it comes to Biden’s defense. He answered, “I think it is going to be very effective. They may have personal experience with understanding this.”
In regards to the prosecution, Tapper noted that they were trying to so how cognitively incapable he was to possess a firearm. “He didn’t even get his private dance that obviously the prosecution is trying to make that point, like, look at how messed up he was or whatever,” he said.
Butler didn’t explain why it was a bad thing for Hunter to attempt that defense.