The Media Research Center had a massive meltdown over Hunter Biden’s pardon — yet its meltdowns over him didn’t stop after his father left the White House. In a Jan. 24 post, Jorge Bonilla had a meltdown when Politico reporters discussed how they refused to promote the story when it first came out:
It is one thing to look at the awful suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story ahead of the 2020 presidential election and imagine what happened. It is entirely another to watch reporters confirm these suppressions and talk about them openly.
Watch as former Politico reporters Tara Palmeri and Marc Caputo discuss the lengths to which Politico avoided the Hunter Biden laptop until The Dirty 51 published their letter[.] […]
“Don’t write about the laptop, don’t talk about the laptop, don’t tweet about the laptop.”Everybody suspects that this is standard M.O. for the elite Acela media which, in fairness, suppresses Democrat-adverse stuff all the time. But how often are reporters left hanging by their editors?
Curiously unmentioned by Bonilla: As we detailed way back when, the New York Post, which first reported the laptop story, refused to offer any independent verification of it to overcome the fact that it’s a highly partisan right-wing pro-Trump outlet. Nevertheless, Bonilla continued to whine:
The laptop story is proof evident of censorship at Politico. You have their political reporters assigned to Biden on the record saying that they did not write any stories about it until Natasha Bertrand, who previously promoted the Russia Hoax, took the Dirty 51 letter and ran with it. Editor decisions drove these omissions, which our own data show helped swing the election to then-Former Vice President Joe Biden.
When considering the extent to which the media’s credibility has been destroyed, it is important to consider their silence over these suppressions in comparison to the collective mea culpa over their coverage of the 2016 presidential election.
By contrast, the MRC has completely censored the story of how boss Brent Bozell’s son, “Zeeker,” took part in the Capitol riot — an attempted insurrection his father endorsed — and committed vandalism while there. We don’t see Bonilla fretting about the MRC’s credibility as a result of suppressing the story because it makes the boss look bad.
Tim Graham ranted about this in his podcast the same day:
Two Politico alums — Tara Palmeri and Marc Caputo –dropped a bombshell about how their old employer mandated bias by omission on Hunter Biden in 2020. Their “cowardly editors” made “dumb decisions”!
On the podcast hosted by Palmeri (now at the media-news site Puck), Caputo explained “I was covering Biden at the time, and I remember coming to my editor and saying, ‘Hey, we need to write about the Hunter Biden laptop.’ And I was told this came from on high at Politico: Don’t write about the laptop, don’t talk about the laptop, don’t tweet about the laptop. And the only thing Politico wound up writing was that piece that called it disinformation, which charitably could be called misinformation, at the least.”
They only touched it once it was time to follow the Biden campaign’s orders and that piece came from Natasha Bertrand (now at CNN), under the headline “Hunter Biden story is Russian disinfo, dozens of former intel officials say.” These are the 51 officials organized by the Biden campaign, Democrats and Trump-hating Republicans. This group was organized by Antony Blinken, who became Secretary of State after this helped Biden get elected.
[…]The media worked hand in glove with Democrats to suppress facts, not report them. Reporters don’t win prestigious prizes like the Pulitzer for exposing Democrats. Newspapers won Pulitzers by attacking Donald Trump and his taxes, or Trump and unfounded allegations of Russian collusion to win in 2016.
What, exactly was “unfounded” about allegations of Russian collusion? Trump and his associates met dozens of times with Russian operatives, which seems pretty darn founded. And Graham similarly ignored the fact that there was no independent verification of the laptop story until forensic examinations were performed months later. And he’s certainly not going to mention how he and his co-workers were paid to suppress the story of Bozell’s son’s criminality.