The Washington Post deals with the Hunter Biden laptop about face
Page A19 is always a good place to bury a story
The Washington Post of April 4, 2022, contained an article written by their technology reporter, Cristiano Lima, on the way the mainstream media handled the Hunter Biden laptop story. To the good, the story was far better penned than many articles written in the cartoonish and bombastic style of the Post lately. I think Mr. Lima has a future as an editor at the Post. It is also a positive that the article was written at all since it shed some light on the Hunter Biden laptop story that the Post and almost all other MSM outlets had long suppressed.
If a reader had no context in which to judge the article it comes across as reasonable. However, there is an immense amount of backstory and context which makes it clear that the writer was bending over backwards to defend the undefendable. Let’s look at the story line by line:
“Facebook limited the reach of the story while it attempted to look into the veracity of the report”. First of all, said research by Facebook was never done or if done never released. Secondly, it was apparent to anyone who cared to look that most if not all of the material on the laptop was genuine. Glenn Greenwald staked his career on its legitimacy almost at once. It should have taken Facebook, Twitter, et al no more than a few days to verify key elements of the laptop’s contents-- if they wanted to, but clearly this was counter to the narrative they wanted to push prior to the election.
“…concerns it was based on hacked materials.” Using purloined or leaked material is and always has been part of the tool kit of the press going back to Benjamin Franklin, the Pentagon Papers, and most notoriously endless “disclosures” during the Trump collusion campaign. This is hypocrisy of the highest order. Correction, it’s so ludicrous in the face of every day journalistic practice that one wonders who this was meant to fool. Perhaps a typical DNC cultist? A typical WaPo reader?
“neither expert reported finding evidence that individual emails…had been manipulated by hackers, but neither was able to rule out the possibility” As Lima well knows, it’s generally not possible to prove a negative like, just for an example, President Biden did not accept bribes from Ukrainian oligarchs.
The author left out his own paper’s role in ignoring and downplaying the New York Post story. He mentions the role of the 51 former intelligence officers who expressed doubt that the laptop was genuine while showing no curiosity about who organized their letter and how very carefully they hedged their statement. Of course, virtually all of mainstream media totally ignored their weasel caveats and as expected reported that the intelligence officers said it was “Russian disinformation” As an aside, it now appears that the FBI has made the laptop disappear completely. This does not enhance their already battered reputation as an impartial defender of truth and justice along with the rest of the “intelligence” community.
In summary, kudos for Mr. Lima in writing this article given the weak hand he was dealt and the dangerous shoals he had to navigate. Post employees have been fired for less.