The Mediaverse by Dennis Kneale, TruthDAO columnist
We now have less than six weeks to go till the mid-term congressional elections, when voters might blame Democrats for soaring costs of food and gas, higher interest rates for new mortgages, and plunging stock prices.
Will the American mainstream media come to the rescue of Joe Biden—again?
In the closing weeks of the presidential election in 2020, the New York Post published a scoop on a laptop owned by his wayward son, Hunter. It held emails showing he had used his dad’s status to raise money overseas and had set aside a 10% cut for “the Big Guy”; and photos and videos of Hunter, bare-chested or buck naked, smoking crack and cavorting with women.
The media covered it up or ignored it, with Twitter and Facebook imposing an unconstitutional prior restraint on the Post by refusing to let the paper publish a link to the story online. Some 51 former U.S. intelligence officers signed a statement declaring the laptop likely was Russian disinformation.
The media lapped it up, even though nobody had seen the laptop, and the petition was led by two Trump haters: John Brennan, Obama CIA director, now on MSNBC; and Jim Clapper, Obama director of national intelligence, now on CNN. Only after a delay of 16 months did the media admit what was obvious: the Hunter Biden laptop was authentic.
The New York Times waited until March 16, 2022, when a story on a Hunter Biden tax probe cited the laptop evidence down in the 24th paragraph. The Washington Post waited until March 30 to yield, in the fifth paragraph of its story.
Later, various polls by conservative firms reported that 5% to 16% of Biden voters said they would have changed their votes had they known the laptop was authentic.
Even now, the media are incurious about whether President Biden was receiving a 10% cut of his son’s panhandling. These are the same guys who spent four years promoting Russiagate without discovering it was an FBI-orchestrated hoax aimed at tarnishing Trump.
This raises a question: are the media suppressing bad news to protect Biden and the Democrats, stories that might convey a sense of chaos and disarray? Consider:
— Russia’s Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines likely were sabotaged beneath the Baltic Sea on Sept. 26, releasing, in a few days, hundreds of thousands of metric tons of greenhouse gases into the sea and the atmosphere. The equivalent of a mid-sized city’s emissions for a full year.
— Usually this would be huge news for the Climate Change fear mongers, but the media response has been muted. The New York Times carried a whirlpool photo on Page One on Wednesday, but confined the story to page A10, with no mention of it on the opening page online. The Washington Post on Thursday cited the biggest methane leak ever, “but it may not be enough to have a major effect on climate change, experts say.”
— Two weeks after President Biden declared that MAGA Republicans were a threat to democracy, a 41-year-old Biden supporter mowed down an 18-year-old Trump supporter with his SUV, killing him. Shannon Brandt confessed to the cops—and was let out on $50,000 bail. Hardly covered at all; his name doesn’t show up on the Times website.
— Several hundred thousand homes in Puerto Rico were still without power 10 days after Hurricane Fiona devastated the island. As conservative radio host Mark Levin pointed out, in the Trump era this story would have been a national scandal. Only on Monday (Oct. 3) did Biden head to Puerto Rico, saying \”they haven\’t been taken very good care of.\” On Wednesday, he visited visit a ravaged Florida, where the death count has surpassed 100 people from Hurricane Ian, and 2.5 million people are without power.
— The media are eager to report any whiff of white supremacy. Yet a total of 26 blacks were murdered in white-on-black racist incidents nationwide in 2021; in Chicago, more blacks are murdered by other blacks in a single month, and the media ignore it. According to the FBI, in 2019 more than 88% of blacks who were murdered in the U.S. were killed by other blacks.
— Last month, when a black Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate was caught on tape saying whites should be treated like sh*t, the media stood down, as I wrote here. They also trumpeted the allegations of a black Duke University volleyball player who said fans at a match in Utah had shouted racial slurs at her last month, and dropped the story when a thorough investigation failed to find any evidence supporting her account.
At this point it is hard to discern: are the media simply anti-white, or do they suppress news coverage because they are pro-Biden? The answer is a singular one: yup.
Dennis Kneale, @denniskneale on Twitter, is a media strategist and writer in New York. He spent more than 30 years at The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, CNBC,andFox Business.