There’s an old-school journalistic adage that goes, “If your mother tells you she loves you, check it out.” Translation: Make sure all your facts are airtight before we go to print. Obviously, though, this comes from a bygone era — an era back before mainstream media journalists, editors, and publishers devolved into no-good hyper-partisan scumbags.
Those were the days.
These days, though, the Fourth Estate has its massive thumb firmly on the political scale, and at no time and in no place has this been more evident than its astounding indifference to the New York Post’s bombshell reporting on the influence peddling and self-enrichment schemes of the Biden Crime Family.
Take, for example, a “perspective” piece by Thomas Rid that appeared in Saturday’s Washington Post. Rid, a professor of strategic studies at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies, insists that Hunter Biden’s emails — the ones found on the laptop abandoned at a local computer repair shop, the ones whose authenticity no one has seriously challenged — should be assumed to be fake. Put bluntly, Rid says, “We must treat the Hunter Biden leaks as if they were a foreign intelligence operation — even if they probably aren’t.”
“Even if they probably aren’t.” Let that sink in.
Rid, who seems like a useful idiot of the Biden campaign, insists that what we have here isn’t worthy of journalistic exploration. At least not until after the election.
“First,” he insists, “every individual little fact — every email, every text, every photo — must be independently verified when data is surfaced in such a suspicious way, not just one piece of information. Genuine photos, for example, could be there simply to add credibility to forged emails surfaced along with the photos — shielding a few forgeries with genuine content would be a time-tested active measures tactic.”
Nothing to see but RUSSIAN INTERFERENCE, folks. Move along.
So much for a curious and intrepid media — at least when the subject is a Democrat nominee for president. As The Daily Wire’s Tim Pearce writes, “Arguably the most impactful disinformation drop of the 2016 campaign was the unverified, and since debunked, Steele dossier first published by BuzzFeed that fueled ex-special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into allegations that the Trump campaign colluded with Russian agents to influence the 2016 election. Rid’s roughly 1,700-word article never mentions the dossier, however, and instead compares the Biden emails to a ‘Russian hack-and-leak operation.’”
What we have here, then, is a mainstream media cabal that in 2016 and 2017 launched itself headlong into the thickets of a real Russian disinformation campaign in order to damage then-candidate and now-President Donald Trump, and yet today, in the face of zero evidence that the Russians are involved in creating phony Hunter Biden emails and phony Hunter Biden images on a phony Hunter Biden MacBook, it sees Russkies lurking behind every laptop.
As Rid put it, “Take a step back, and the Russian interference of 2016 holds valuable lessons on what to do and what not to do in 2020.” Ah, now they take a step back. Now they decide to err on the side of the accused.
Or, as Matt Taibbi — that rarest of rare birds, an honest lefty journalist — puts it, “The least curious people in the country right now appear to be the credentialed news media, a situation normally unique to tinpot authoritarian societies.”
If there’s a lesson to be learned here, it’s certainly this: We should be treating our mainstream media and certain academic elites as if they were nothing more than paid shills for the Biden campaign … even if they probably aren’t.