MSM answers Miscers on Hunter Biden

[SultanofBling]

"Why wont the Leftist media cover Hunter Biden."

Common complaint. Basically, any Miscer that feels like this was a trumped up hit-piece should feel vindicated. It could have been much more legitimate had R. Giuliani not broken rank, and had not jumped the gun and leaked the information on his own will.

Here's an answer. I'm posting the whole article as I'm aware there's often paywalls blocking readership to great articles.

Trump Had One Last Story to Sell. The Wall Street Journal Wouldn’t Buy It.

The three had pinned their hopes for re-electing the president on a fourth guest, a straight-shooting Wall Street Journal White House reporter named Michael Bender. They delivered the goods to him there: a cache of emails detailing Hunter Biden’s business activities, and, on speaker phone, a former business partner of Hunter Biden’s named Tony Bobulinski. Mr. Bobulinski was willing to go on the record in The Journal with an explosive claim: that Joe Biden, the former vice president, had been aware of, and profited from, his son’s activities. The Trump team left believing that The Journal would blow the thing open and their excitement was conveyed to the president.

The Journal had seemed to be the perfect outlet for a story the Trump advisers believed could sink Mr. Biden’s candidacy. Its small-c conservatism in reporting means the work of its news pages carries credibility across the industry. And its readership leans further right than other big news outlets. Its Washington bureau chief, Paul Beckett, recently remarked at a virtual gathering of Journal reporters and editors that while he knows that the paper often delivers unwelcome news to the many Trump supporters who read it, The Journal should protect its unique position of being trusted across the political spectrum, two people familiar with the remarks said.

As the Trump team waited with excited anticipation for a Journal exposé, the newspaper did its due diligence: Mr. Bender and Mr. Beckett handed the story off to a well-regarded China correspondent, James Areddy, and a Capitol Hill reporter who had followed the Hunter Biden story, Andrew Duehren. Mr. Areddy interviewed Mr. Bobulinski. They began drafting an article.

Then things got messy. Without warning his notional allies, Rudy Giuliani, the former New York mayor and now a lawyer for President Trump, burst onto the scene with the tabloid version of the McLean crew’s carefully laid plot. Mr. Giuliani delivered a cache of documents of questionable provenance — but containing some of the same emails — to The New York Post, a sister publication to The Journal in Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. Mr. Giuliani had been working with the former Trump aide Steve Bannon, who also began leaking some of the emails to favored right-wing outlets. Mr. Giuliani’s complicated claim that the emails came from a laptop Hunter Biden had abandoned, and his refusal to let some reporters examine the laptop, cast a pall over the story — as did The Post’s reporting, which alleged but could not prove that Joe Biden had been involved in his son’s activities.

While the Trump team was clearly jumpy, editors in The Journal’s Washington bureau were wrestling with a central question: Could the documents, or Mr. Bobulinski, prove that Joe Biden was involved in his son’s lobbying? Or was this yet another story of the younger Mr. Biden trading on his family’s name — a perfectly good theme, but not a new one or one that needed urgently to be revealed before the election.

Mr. Trump and his allies expected the Journal story to appear Monday, Oct. 19, according to Mr. Bannon. That would be late in the campaign, but not too late — and could shape that week’s news cycle heading into the crucial final debate last Thursday. An “important piece” in The Journal would be coming soon, Mr. Trump told aides on a conference call that day.

His comment was not appreciated inside The Journal.

“The editors didn’t like Trump’s insinuation that we were being teed up to do this hit job,” a Journal reporter who wasn’t directly involved in the story told me. But the reporters continued to work on the draft as the Thursday debate approached, indifferent to the White House’s frantic timeline.

Finally, Mr. Bobulinski got tired of waiting.

“He got spooked about whether they were going to do it or not,” Mr. Bannon said.

At 7:35 Wednesday evening, Mr. Bobulinski emailed an on-the-record, 684-word statement making his case to a range of news outlets. Breitbart News published it in full. He appeared the next day in Nashville to attend the debate as Mr. Trump’s surprise guest, and less than two hours before the debate was to begin, he read a six-minute statement to the press, detailing his allegations that the former vice president had involvement in his son’s business dealings.

When Mr. Trump stepped on stage, the president acted as though the details of the emails and the allegations were common knowledge. “You’re the big man, I think. I don’t know, maybe you’re not,” he told Mr. Biden at some point, a reference to an ambiguous sentence from the documents.

As the debate ended, The Wall Street Journal published a brief item, just the stub of Mr. Areddy and Mr. Duehren’s reporting. The core of it was that Mr. Bobulinski had failed to prove the central claim. “Corporate records reviewed by The Wall Street Journal show no role for Joe Biden,” The Journal reported.

Asked about The Journal’s handling of the story, the editor in chief, Matt Murray, said the paper did not discuss its newsgathering. “Our rigorous and trusted journalism speaks for itself,” Mr. Murray said in an emailed statement.

And if you’d been watching the debate, but hadn’t been obsessively watching Fox News or reading Breitbart, you would have had no idea what Mr. Trump was talking about. The story the Trump team hoped would upend the campaign was fading fast.

The gatekeepers return
The McLean group's failed attempt to sway the election is partly just another story revealing the chaotic, threadbare quality of the Trump operation — a far cry from the coordinated “disinformation” machinery feared by liberals.

But it’s also about a larger shift in the American media, one in which the gatekeepers appear to have returned after a long absence.

It has been a disorienting couple of decades, after all. It all began when The Drudge Report, Gawker and the blogs started telling you what stodgy old newspapers and television networks wouldn’t. Then social media brought floods of content pouring over the old barricades.

By 2015, the old gatekeepers had entered a kind of crisis of confidence, believing they couldn’t control the online news cycle any better than King Canute could control the tides. Television networks all but let Donald Trump take over as executive producer that summer and fall. In October 2016, Julian Assange and James Comey seemed to drive the news cycle more than the major news organizations. Many figures in old media and new bought into the idea that in the new world, readers would find the information they wanted to read — and therefore, decisions by editors and producers, about whether to cover something and how much attention to give it, didn’t mean much.

But the last two weeks have proved the opposite: that the old gatekeepers, like The Journal, can still control the agenda. It turns out there is a big difference between WikiLeaks and establishment media coverage of WikiLeaks, a difference between a Trump tweet and an article about it, even between an opinion piece in The Wall Street Journal suggesting Joe Biden had done bad things, and a news article that didn’t reach that conclusion.


Perhaps the most influential media document of the last four years is a chart by a co-director of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard, Yochai Benkler. The study showed that a dense new right-wing media sphere had emerged — and that the mainstream news “revolved around the agenda that the right-wing media sphere set.”

Mr. Bannon had known this, too. He described his strategy as “anchor left, pivot right,” and even as he ran Breitbart News, he worked to place attacks on Hillary Clinton in mainstream outlets. The validating power of those outlets was clear when The New York Times and Washington Post were given early access in the spring of 2015 to the book “Clinton Cash,” an investigation of the Clinton family’s blurring of business, philanthropic and political interests by the writer Peter Schweizer.

Mr. Schweizer is still around this cycle. But you won’t find his work in mainstream outlets. He’s over on Breitbart, with a couple of Hunter Biden stories this month.

And the fact that Mr. Bobulinski emerged not in the pages of the widely respected Journal but in a statement to Breitbart was essentially Mr. Bannon’s nightmare, and Mr. Benkler’s fondest wish. And a broad array of mainstream outlets, unpersuaded that Hunter Biden’s doings tie directly to the former vice president, have largely kept the story off their front pages, and confined to skeptical explanations of what Mr. Trump and his allies are claiming about his opponent.

“SO USA TODAY DIDN’T WANT TO RUN MY HUNTER BIDEN COLUMN THIS WEEK,” the conservative writer Glenn Reynolds complained Oct. 20, posting the article instead to his blog. President Trump himself hit a wall when he tried to push the Hunter Biden narrative onto CBS News.

“This is ‘60 Minutes,’ and we can’t put on things we can’t verify,” Lesley Stahl told him. Mr. Trump then did more or less the same thing as Mr. Reynolds, posting a video of his side of the interview to his own blog, ********.

The media’s control over information, of course, is not as total as it used to be. The people who own printing presses and broadcast towers can’t actually stop you from reading leaked emails or unproven theories about Joe Biden’s knowledge of his son’s business. But what Mr. Benkler’s research showed was that the elite outlets’ ability to set the agenda endured in spite of social media.

We should have known it, of course. Many of our readers, screaming about headlines on Twitter, did. And Mr. Trump knew it all along — one way to read his endless attacks on the establishment media is as an expression of obsession, a form of love. This week, you can hear howls of betrayal from people who have for years said the legacy media was both utterly biased and totally irrelevant.

“For years, we’ve respected and even revered the sanctified position of the free press,” wrote Dana Loesch, a right-wing commentator not particularly known for her reverence of legacy media, expressing frustration that the Biden story was not getting attention. “Now that free press points its digital pen at your throat when you question their preferences.”

[SultanofBling]

(continued)

On the other side of the gate
There’s something amusing — even a bit flattering — in such earnest protestations from a right-wing movement rooted in efforts to discredit the independent media. And this reassertion of control over information is what you’ve seen many journalists call for in recent years. At its best, it can also close the political landscape to a trendy new form of dirty tricks, as in France in 2017, where the media largely ignored a last-minute dump of hacked emails from President Emmanuel Macron’s campaign just before a legally mandated blackout period.

But I admit that I feel deep ambivalence about this revenge of the gatekeepers. I spent my career, before arriving at The Times in March, on the other side of the gate, lobbing information past it to a very online audience who I presumed had already seen the leak or the rumor, and seeing my job as helping to guide that audience through the thicket, not to close their eyes to it. “The media’s new and unfamiliar job is to provide a framework for understanding the wild, unvetted, and incredibly intoxicating information that its audience will inevitably see — not to ignore it,” my colleague John Herrman (also now at The Times) and I wrote in 2013. In 2017, I made the decision to publish the unverified “Steele dossier,” in part on the grounds that gatekeepers were looking at it and influenced by it, but keeping it from their audience.

This fall, top media and tech executives were bracing to refight the last war — a foreign-backed hack-and-leak operation like WikiLeaks seeking to influence the election’s outcome. It was that hyper-vigilance that led Twitter to block links to The New York Post’s article about Hunter Biden — a frighteningly disproportionate response to a story that other news organizations were handling with care. The schemes of Mr. Herschmann, Mr. Passantino and Mr. Schwartz weren’t exactly WikiLeaks. But the special nervousness that many outlets, including this one, feel about the provenance of the Hunter Biden emails is, in many ways, the legacy of the WikiLeaks experience.

I’d prefer to put my faith in Mr. Murray and careful, professional journalists like him than in the social platforms’ product managers and executives. And I hope Americans relieved that the gatekeepers are reasserting themselves will also pay attention to who gets that power, and how centralized it is, and root for new voices to correct and challenge them.

[fitnessislife]

Cool story, wincel.

[anonymous]

Cliffs?

[OPGenesis]

Cliffs?

This.

[NYPat]

Cliffs?

Only the tabloid NY Post was willing to run fake news.

[OPGenesis]

Only the tabloid NY Post was willing to run fake news.

They're just following their cohorts at the Times and WaPo.

Can't fault them, Pat.

[SultanofBling]

Honestly, if you guys had the time to go through HB getting a footjob and measuring his d*ck size...you should have the time to read the above lol.

But basically:

- Trump Admin wanted the HB story to break on the Wall Street Journal, which was known for its conservative (small c) angle
- WSJ began working on a draft of the story, but had some misgivings about the information provided (notably the emails, everything looked like a JB hit piece disguised as a HB expose)
- Rudy Giuliani decided to act and sent it to NYPost instead, thus taking the story away from WSJ
- WSJ later published an article that was lesser in form and concluded: the core of it was that Mr. Bobulinski had failed to prove the central claim. “Corporate records reviewed by The Wall Street Journal show no role for Joe Biden,”
- Article then goes into the role of media in a mass media age, media as the traditional gate keeper, etc.

[1fast1]

Only the tabloid NY Post was willing to run fake news.

the fake news of actually legit emails that have already been verified/corroborated?
oh ok.

[Mountaineer92]

nypat = so braindead he follows NYTimes that publishes pee tapes, WMDs, ran PR for Stalin and Mao, russia russia russia, etc.

[jtaylor2010]

Lold at the media suddenly pretending to care about verifying stories after years of “won’t disavow white supremacy, Russian collusion, fine people hoax, and obstruction”.

[SultanofBling]

nypat = so braindead he follows NYTimes that publishes pee tapes, WMDs, ran PR for Stalin and Mao, russia russia russia, etc.

An ad hominem isn't an argument Mountaineer92.

[ItsJamesthefin]

Lol imagine believing that the whole Hunter thing is B.S.

[ImpressiveGainz]

Pogue & Iceman1800 are losers.

Oh so that’s who they are...thanks!

[Austanian]

Oh yes we need to verify the information first... I know all sorts of laptops have videos of Hunter smoking crack and banging chicks on it and emails that have been verified by the other parties. Probably wasn't his.


I know the media would never run with unverified hit pieces against a presidential nominee/president.

[rampagefc77]

This is basically the MSM drawing the line in the sand and admitting that they refuse to write anything negative against the establishment.

Last election we had actual emails from the DNC and podesta released, which were buried in favor of russian disinformation about trump paid for by clinton to influence the election. It ended up being 100% false...

Even as people realized it was 100% false over the last few years, the MSM continued to breathlessly report on it. After being proven wrong about 100x, you'd think they would apply some standard to verify the truth or authenticity... but hey didn't.

Now actual emails from hunter biden and his business associated emerge, which happen to line up perfectly with Biden's own admissions on tape, and the MSM refuses to even look at these. Even after the ODNI says it's not foreign interference. Even after business associates on the email chains verify the contents. Even after Biden refuses to say they are fake. Even after these very business dealings have raised red flags in govt for years...

Truly frightening times...

[SultanofBling]

This is basically the MSM drawing the line in the sand and admitting that they refuse to write anything negative against the establishment.

Last election we had actual emails from the DNC and podesta released, which were buried in favor of russian disinformation about trump paid for by clinton to influence the election. It ended up being 100% false...

Even as people realized it was 100% false over the last few years, the MSM continued to breathlessly report on it. After being proven wrong about 100x, you'd think they would apply some standard to verify the truth or authenticity... but hey didn't.

Now actual emails from hunter biden and his business associated emerge, which happen to line up perfectly with Biden's own admissions on tape, and the MSM refuses to even look at these. Even after the ODNI says it's not foreign interference. Even after business associates on the email chains verify the contents. Even after Biden refuses to say they are fake. Even after these very business dealings have raised red flags in govt for years...

Truly frightening times...

Respectfully disagree. This is MSM saying that they're not going to post unsubstantiated drivel. They reviewed the docs, the leaks, the emails, etc. They found the probative value of the piece to be lesser than the potential damage to the Biden campaign.

It's their choice, ultimately. But it is a big sign that a conservative leaning journal like the WSJ declined a supposedly "Watergate" level reveal of the "Crooked Biden Family." We might finally get some spine in journalism again.

Inb4 everyone calls me a shill and then posts the same content the Russian bots churn up.

[Stizzel]

Did not read lol

[TonyTriangles]

lol at MSM double standards. if the roles were reversed and it was Don Jr, the media would play this non-stop until the next election.

[SultanofBling]

lol at MSM double standards. if the roles were reversed and it was Don Jr, the media would play this non-stop until the next election.

Hypothetical

[xbluexhawkx]

[SultanofBling]

G-o-l-d.

I'll check back in with you in eight days.

[LeftistGent]

Most people knew it was all bullchit. Hunter might be corrupt and full of personal issues, but there's no hard evidence that joe biden was in on the china stuff or that he benefited from it all. My guess is even Rudy G knew and blew his load early on purpose to try to save it somehow.

Anyway, none of it matters in the eyes of the voters. Everyone made up their mind long ago.

[Polaris]

[cjayzzz]

tldr

TRUMP2020

[xbluexhawkx]

G-o-l-d.

I'll check back in with you in eight days.

same to you!
will be burriful

[IPoopStandingUp]

You'd be happier on reddit op

[SultanofBling]

You'd be happier on reddit op

Por que?

[Vito-C]

The WSJ is too reputable to bother entertaining an obvious tabloid story from the Trump campaign. Glad to see actual (R) journalists debunked this nonsense.

The Trump campaign pitched that nothing burger like a Trump casino in Atlantic City but no one bought it except the suckers on the misc.

[DKM89]

Respectfully disagree. This is MSM saying that they're not going to post unsubstantiated drivel. They reviewed the docs, the leaks, the emails, etc. They found the probative value of the piece to be lesser than the potential damage to the Biden campaign.

It's their choice, ultimately. But it is a big sign that a conservative leaning journal like the WSJ declined a supposedly "Watergate" level reveal of the "Crooked Biden Family." We might finally get some spine in journalism again.

Inb4 everyone calls me a shill and then posts the same content the Russian bots churn up.

The same MSM that had NO ISSUE running fake russia collusion stories about trump for his entire presidency? The same MSM that had no issue destroying the reputation of Brett Kavanaugh and spreading ridiculous stories of him being a serial gang rapist with literally ZERO evidence to back it? Who would bring on any and every crackpot that would say anything negative just to push the narrative? It looks like the MSM does nothing but post "unsubstantiated drivel", so long as it's attacking conservatives and Trump. There is more evidence to support this story than any of the garbage you've been fed for years regarding russia, ukraine, and kavanaugh... yet libs seem to be more concerned with how the laptop came into the hands of Guliani, rather than the actual damning content that it holds.