The real scandal just might be the media’s own reporting when it comes to the Biden family: If you ask Conservatives and Liberals about Hunter Biden or his father President Joe Biden you will get two different narratives. Each side selectively edits factoids to cherry-pick factoids to craft its own narrative.
Republicans who turn to Fox News or other conservative media hear that Joe Biden may have accepted a bribe from a Burisma executive for $5 million according to an FBI FD-1023 form; however, they may not hear that such forms are preliminary complaints that have not been verified or that the man behind it possibly was a con man.
“We are concerned that an official committee of the House of Representatives has been manipulated by an apparent con man who, while a fugitive from justice, attempted to fortify his defense by laundering unfounded and potentially false allegations through Congress,” Ranking Member Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) wrote in a letter alongside Rep. Daniel Goldman (D-N.Y.).
Skepticism is always warranted in any investigation until it can be independently verified.
Democrats will tune into outlets that reflect their own personal biases and hear that Joe Biden is a caring father who has stuck with his son despite his mistakes. They will hear that Hunter Biden is being unfairly persecuted because he is Joe Biden’s son.
They will not hear that Gal Luft, the recently indicted informant who filed the FD-1023 complaint, was indicted for violating the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) for working with the same company the Bidens worked with. They also will not hear in the old-line media that CEFC Energy, the company that Luft was indicted for working with, and who Joe Biden may have financially benefited from, was intimately connected with Chinese military intelligence. Nor will they hear that Luft worked with Patrick Ho, the man who Hunter Biden called “the … spy chief of China” and stuck his neck out for.
“Hunter also banked far more cash from CEFC: Luft’s think tank got $350,000 a year from a CEFC nonprofit arm, while Hunter and entities associated with him cleared millions (and that’s only what we know about) for his “work” with the for-profit side of the company,” The New York Post editorial board said. “And at least one of his allegations — that Joe Biden was present at a meeting with CEFC bigs in DC right after leaving office — has apparently been independently confirmed.
“Which means that Reps. Jim Comer, Jim Jordan and others are beyond right to press hard on the issue.”
Bad Reporting Undermines Confidence in Media
People end up believing what they want to believe because the goal in the media has become spinning partisan narratives instead of dispassionately and accurately reporting all of the facts.
“One of the things I worry about is that the so-called reality-based press, which is pretty much everything except Fox and its clones don’t seem to speak to and get through to the MAGA Republicans, the heavy-duty cult members who love Trump so much, they simply don’t believe it,” Guardian US columnist Margaret Sullivan said on The Guardian’s podcast with Jonathan Freedland. “You can throw as many facts as you want at them and it’s rejected, and so we no longer have across the board a common basis for reality or truth. I worry about the effect on democracy when that is the case.”
Sullivan like many writers for old media outlets fail to see how they undermined themselves. They spent years pushing the subsequently debunked Trump-Russia collusion narrative. Then they worked to cover up the origin of COVID. It should not be surprising then to find out that those who support Trump do not believe them.
The days of media skepticism in which government officials were presumed to be lying unless proven otherwise have waned. During the Trump-Russia collusion narrative, intelligence and national-security officials were taken at face value instead of treating them with skepticism like journalism schools once taught.
In the old days of reporting, reporters were expected to get both sides to every story and to report everything even if it did not conform with a particular partisan narrative. In 1987, Joe Biden was forced from the race after media reports disclosed that the then-senator had lied about his time in law school.
Today, reporters tend to automatically adopt confirmation biases that they transfer to their readers based on the ideological lens of the writer and filter out inconvenient points. Opinion has become conflated with solid reporting.
Sullivan is probably correct, however, when she says that voters will care more about Joe Biden’s age and the fact he would be 86 at the end of a second term than they are about Hunter Biden.
John Rossomando is a defense and counterterrorism analyst and served as Senior Analyst for Counterterrorism at The Investigative Project on Terrorism for eight years. His work has been featured in numerous publications such as The American Thinker, The National Interest, National Review Online, Daily Wire, Red Alert Politics, CNSNews.com, The Daily Caller, Human Events, Newsmax, The American Spectator, TownHall.com, and Crisis Magazine. He also served as senior managing editor of The Bulletin, a 100,000-circulation daily newspaper in Philadelphia, and received the Pennsylvania Associated Press Managing Editors first-place award for his reporting.
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