Mainstream Media Ignores Explosive Hunter Biden Report

Hunter Biden with then President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden during a college basketball game at the Verizon Center in Washington on Jan. 30, 2010. (Mitchell Layton/Getty Images)

Mainstream media has shown little interest in several of the New York Post’s bombshell Hunter Biden reports since they first came out on the morning of Oct. 14.

The reports, based on data from an alleged laptop hard drive that belongs to Hunter Biden, suggest that Hunter Biden used his father’s influence, then-Vice President Joe Biden, to make lucrative deals with big companies from Ukraine and China.

NewsBusters found that on Oct. 14 and Oct. 15, out of a total of 92 hours of news programming from ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, and MSNBC combined, only 9 minutes, 47 seconds were spent on the report. That was less than 0.2 percent of the available airtime.

CNN and ABC completely ignored the report on those two days, while CBS and MSNBC both contributed about 4 and half minutes to the Hunter Biden scandal, the analysis claimed.

Even when the media mentioned it, “they devoted much of their time to knocking it down,” said Geoffrey Dickens, the Deputy Research Director at Media Research Center.

Hours after the initial New York Post report was published, social media giants Facebook and Twitter took unprecedented steps to block or limit access to the story.

Facebook and Twitter faced strong backlash over their actions.

The Senate Judiciary Committee will hold a vote on Oct. 22 to issue a subpoena to Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey after the New York Post’s reports on Hunter Biden were blocked, saying the act may constitute election interference.

White House chief of staff Mark Meadows also suggested Monday that the Trump administration would bring a lawsuit against the social media companies that have recently restricted and blocked news reports about Joe Biden and his son Hunter.

The first response of the New York Times and USA Today focused more on the unusual actions taken by Facebook and Twitter than on the breaking scandal itself. “Facebook and Twitter found the story dubious enough to limit access to it on their platform,” stated a New York Times article on Oct. 14.

An article from USA Today on Oct. 16 titled “FBI probing whether emails in New York Post story about Hunter Biden are tied to Russian disinformation,” echoed a CNN report from earlier that afternoon.

However, John Ratcliffe, Director of National Intelligence, made it clear that “Hunter Biden’s laptop is not part of some Russian disinformation campaign” in an interview with Fox News on Monday, Oct. 19.

The New York Times then published another article on Oct. 18, indicating that New York Post reporters had doubts about the authenticity of the hard drive’s contents.

In response, the New York Post published an editorial later that day titled: “‘Unverified’ is a (false) excuse for ignoring The Post’s Hunter Biden scoops,” pointing out that the New York Times and other outlets took a different standard when reporting negative news on Trump, such as the false “Russiagate” and other stories.

A Biden campaign surrogate, Jenna Arnold, admitted on Oct. 18 in an interview with Fox News that nobody has said the emails are inauthentic.

According to Politico, senior advisers to Joe Biden cannot rule out the possibility that the former vice president had met with a top Ukrainian energy executive, despite carefully-worded rebuttals from his campaign.