A surge of recent reporting on Hunter Biden by outlets that once widely dismissed and downplayed reports about him in 2020 marks the latest chapter in the debate over mainstream media credibility.
“Federal investigation of Hunter Biden heats up,” reads a CNN headline from March 30. “Hunter Biden Paid Tax Bill, but Broad Federal Investigation Continues,” the New York Times wrote on March 16. “Inside Hunter Biden’s multimillion-dollar deals with a Chinese energy company,” the Washington Post reported on March 30.
All three stories invoke Hunter Biden’s infamous laptop, first reported on with less than a month to go in the 2020 election by the New York Post. It was widely dismissed as unreliable and even Russian disinformation by mainstream print and television outlets, especially MSNBC and CNN, and in an astonishing display of coordination, Twitter and Facebook blocked or limited sharing of the New York Post’s article about Biden; Twitter even locked the New York Post out of its account for weeks.
A year-and-a-half later, the laptop’s contents are part of reporting on what the Washington Post called “the ways in which his family profited from relationships built over Joe Biden’s decades in public service” and how what the New York Times says “his professional life has intersected with his father’s public service.”
It’s a long way from 2020, when a Washington Post columnist called the Biden laptop story “laughably weak” and the paper’s reporters noted “intelligence experts” feared it was part of a “carefully planned information operation. MSNBC contributor Jason Johnson said it was “so obviously a Russian operation,” and CNN’s Brian Stelter hypothesized the emails could be “made up” and the story was simply the “right-wing media machine” in action. “60 Minutes” host Lesley Stahl told then-President Trump in 2020 that the laptop couldn’t be “verified,” and NPR announced it wouldn’t “waste our time” on “stories that are not really stories.”
“News outlets, acting as surrogates for the public, owe it to the citizenry to fully investigate this story, not just for what it tells us about Hunter Biden, but for what it says about broader possible influence peddling,” DePauw University professor Jeffrey McCall told Fox News Digital.
Among those unimpressed with the new reporting is the New York Post itself, whose editorial board wrote “reality forced their hand” on the recent stories from the influential newspapers. The board took particular umbrage with the Washington Post’s declaration of no evidence that President Biden had benefited from millions of dollars in payments from a Chinese energy firm to his son.