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So, why should news organizations give credit to a story whose primary source is a very out of scope Rudy and even the editor who wrote the initial story wouldn't pen their name to it because when they even tried doing basic preliminary journalism to confirm any part of the story that they were left with zippo and the only reason it had to be written is that their bosses wanted it?

The only serious question about it would be that who in their right mind would believe a story that Hunter flew across the US from CA to NY to use some shifty $35 hole in the wall laptop repair place, drop off a pile of laptops, fly home, completely forget about them, the owner then decided to dive through personal data and found "bad things", instead of taking them to the FBI or police, decided that Rudy Giuliani needed them, which then Rudy sat on them for a few months before letting anyone know. Oh, and the mere possession and non-reporting of the "bad things" on the laptop are a felony in and of itself. Wow... interesting that actual journalists wouldn't even give the story the time of day.

Do you expect CNN to do daily breaking news segments on how Sandy Hook wasn't fiction because some right wing radio opinionist is still spouting off daily that the dead kids were actors?

The Steele dossier came from an information agent with a background of competent and viable information and journalists worked on vetting the information before sending any out.

Er except we’ve DKIM validated some of the emails, and they’re concerning in their own right. It’s worth the media at least asking some tough questions about Hunter. If you ignore the conspiracy theory aspects of all of this, the raw facts themselves are still concerning enough to ask questions.

They've validated 1. of the emails, not "some": https://github.com/robertdavidgraham/hunter-dkim

And frankly, possession of a single legitimate email's source text, for an intermediate-profile individual from a corporate account, doesn't somehow prove anything else (which again: is zilch - nothing else about this story is verifiable - it reeks of an intelligence op, especially since Rudy Giuliani is known by the FBI to be routinely in contact with known Russian intelligence operatives).

The Steele dossier was opposition research and turned out to be largely baseless. And we know that with some certainty because there was a huge investigation in to it.

The Biden laptop "scandal" is probably also opposition research and probably also baseless. The response to it is rather contrasting though.

A strong tie between Hunter Biden, James Biden and China is not a news. It was before the laptop become a thing. Read some CNN news on 2019 and 2018, when the water is not that hot. CNN still pose some doubt on Hunter Biden's stance and potential corruption.

For example, Hunter Biden has invested a China company called Face++, which later to be a core technology to surveillance on Uygur.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/12/business/cefc-biden-china...

Patrick Ho, a former Hong Kong official being charged for corruption in US, being accuse of bribing Africa leader for allowing China's Energy company to exploit natural resource in Africa, which is part of the One Belt and One Road grand plan in China. Basically a form of colonialism from China.

The interesting part is right here. When Patrick Ho is on charged, who he called for a help? It is Hunter Biden. Hunter Biden's business partner in China is Ye Jianming, who is the boss of Patrick Ho. Ye Jianming is now "disappeared" or under investigation in CCP because Patrick Ho's arrested and Ye Jianming's operation has failed.

You can seach the keyword here. Those story are in CNN, New York Times etc.

It is pretty strange for the mainstream media to completely ignore the story when they have the same doubt on two years ago.

Tha laptop? It could be a cover-up for a whist-blower. The information could be true or fake. But even without the laptop, there are many evidence that Hunter Biden using his father's name involving in many corruption. And no one asked a question about his father's involvement on that? In fact, Joe Biden has seen Hunter Biden's China customer during the diplomatic visit to China.

If the mainstream media cannot be trusted, then it would be the best catalyst for conspiracy theory. In fact, the bias in the media has strengthened the polarization in the country even more.

> the owner then decided to dive through personal data and found "bad things"

There are certainly some issues with the story. But later on there were photos of Hunter Biden released that certainly depicted what I would describe as "bad things" (those things being drugs).

So pictures do exist that you can lookup yourself. Unless you are going to go conspiracy theory about it, and say that the photos, that you can see yourself, are faked.

So... In retrospect, even if not everything related to the story is accurate, or there were some problems with it, we can now all but confirm that at least something was released that is not "fake news", and that came from this story.

> "bad things" (those things being drugs).

And this is yet another comment made by what I would describe as a "bad person".

I think it is reasonably uncontroversial that many people believe drugs to be some sort of scandal.

But regardless, it is uncontroversial that a large amount of people would describe pictures of someone doing hard drugs as "bad things".

I'm confused as to your intent here. The Hunter Biden laptop story was one of those QAnon conspiracy theories.

And thus the problem: There's no objective distinction between a "conspiracy theory" and a legitimate investigation.

So we have one side saying "You're caught up in conspiracy theories!" and the other saying "You're censoring the truth!"

How do you solve that?

You teach effective critical thinking in schools nationwide for a couple of decades.

You encourage empathy for those you disagree with.

You tolerate intolerant people (but not their intolerant views)

You dig deeper and tell everyone what you found. For the laptop story there was nothing to be found.

Verification takes time, when someone dumps a ton of information publicly and exclaims it is true there is no avoiding some people believing it no matter what happens.

If we are afraid about censoring that being transparent about what is censored and verifying it afterwards can help with that.

However I don't think there is a true solve to misinformation. Lies are catchier than the truth after all.

As terms, 'conspiracy theory' and 'fact' both feel loaded today.

I wonder whether reverting to more neutral labelling would held create a less heated dialogue? Founded and unfounded, for example.

I think of the Hunter Biden laptop story as being a lame Swiftboating slimy character assassination that isn't exactly a new thing in politics. Qanon is a different beast altogether because it stokes this really paranoid "they're all against you" mentality that a large portion of the population seems to have been increasingly susceptible to in recent years.

I’d argue that they’re not entirely wrong. The lives and problems of rural Americans are dramatically different than urban Americans, and given the all-or-nothing nature of the system, neither side is well represented when the other has power.

QAnon is obviously garbage, but it’s a symptom of a broken system that can’t effectively represent the entire population, and not just one half.

No? Nobody was saying Hunter Biden ran a pedo ring with abductions and body doubles replacing key national figures.

It's real-world verifiable that Hunter Biden made 600k/yr for several years for a foreign gas company while his dad was VP and involved in pressuring domestic politics in that country.

And so we come back to GP's point: If mainstream media is calling everything that's not politically advantageous for the dems a "conspiracy theory", then they lose credibility. If everything's a conspiracy theory, nothing is.

For one thing, the Steele dossier was hinted at but not actually released during the election. That's understandable, as it was a piece of opposition research. I read that the Steele dossier was delivered to the press for a while before Buzzfeed leaked it. Then it was discussed as news.

The news organizations were sitting on the document and afterward they said they were verifying its claims.

Large news organizations did run stories. They investigated, found no corroborating evidence, and ran boring stories to that effect. Glenn Greenwald also investigated and found no corroborating evidence, but he hated that some people might take the lack of a smoking gun as evidence that there was no corruption connected to Biden, so he thought the media should use this shady, unlikely, as-yet-unsubstantiated story as a titillating hook to talk really loudly about all the possible ways that Biden and his son might be corrupt.

I can kind of see his point, since everybody in Washington seems to regard Hunter Biden as a completely unexceptional person of no particular merit who makes huge amounts of money because of who his father is, and that should be a scandal, though more a general scandal about the system than about the Bidens specifically.

On the other hand, that's no excuse to make a huge news story out of an unsubstantiated story fed to the media by partisan operatives a few weeks before an election. If they did that, these stories would arise before every election, and part of the political contest between the parties would be competing to come up with the best juicy lies. Considering what a free buffet that would be for the media, I'm honestly surprised that they managed to refrain.

What is coverage of the Hunter Biden story supposed to say? Rudy Guiliani claims he has a laptop that has some emails but refuses to produce the laptop. There is no way a news organization can verify the claims, and the claim itself is just hearsay.

The reason it hasn't been covered is because there is nothing a news organization can publish about it. Fox News passed on it. It is most likely simply bullshit.

I think you raise a good point here, but one that is essentially invalidated by years of journalism that's mostly funded and managed by people with a lot of interest in the political discourse.

Very little of "the press" or "journalism" that reaches the true majority of people can be considered much more than entertainment television. Not only that, they have very clear goals, partisan alignments, and deals to own up to.

My point being, this picture of "the press" is not new nor is it simple to unravel, especially because a lot of the coverage we see, and how it's done, depends on a multitude of factors.

Let's take, for example, your point about the Hunter Biden story and let's allow ourselves to conjecture for a moment.

In a "press" state such as the one I described above, a big part of the "news media" is running amok with the story regardless of having little to no evidence to back it up. On the other hand, the world is still spinning and news that are noteworthy are still coming out. One might even say people should know about these things.

What's one to do in face of such situation? Do we expect that the "news media" devote all focus to arguing the conspiracy theory, which will most likely boost the conversation around it, or should we expect the "news media" to focus on things that can actually be proven, assessed, researched?

Of course, this is one narrow example that only scratches the surface of something that, like I said, is very complex. But I do believe that, considering the current environment, it's more harmful to debate the conspiracy stories than to ignore them. Consider any other conspiracy theory that you ever heard of. Would it be beneficial for anyone to have constant debate on television about whether or not the Earth is round, or if men have been to the Moon, etc.

So the core problem with most of the complaints about it is that nothing substantial ever came out implicating Joe Biden in any way. Some people claimed there was evidence but none was presented.

The news as a whole shrugging off a story about Hunter Biden makes perfect sense, it wasn't about Joe except in so far and Hunter might have name dropped him.

The conspiracy theory for the conspiracy theory is that his campaign owns/runs Q. Q is responsible for many of the other conspiracy theories following that.

In my opinion everyone needs to cool down. America is polarized over being correct, not being happy.

Q is Jim Watkins, or perhaps someone close to him. He's the one who owns the site that Q (now, after the Christchurch shooting) posts "drops" on.

I seriously doubt anyone from Trump's orbit is involved. Qanon was a huge thorn in their side.

> This is not how the press is supposed to work.

It really is. As a former journalist, I can tell you a lot of crackpot stories come across our desks. We look at them, will see if the evidence can ‘stand up’ the story - if not, it gets spiked.

Hunter Biden wasn't running for president. He's an adult responsible for his own choices. If he were trying to profit off his father he'd hardly be the first child to attempt to do so - that probably applies to a third of congress.

For some reason I just can't get the thought out of my head that if this were a kooky story about a rando laptop repair shop in San Francisco that claimed it had Ivanka's laptops with proof she was doing something nefarious you wouldn't have any of these same qualms about the news media treating it skeptically.

Even worse the people have been watching the media fibbing to them nonstop for 20+ years, since Iraq at least.

This is how you get people like Alex Jones. People see the lie, start looking for the truth and here is guy saying "I'll tell you what is really going on!" and if they weave a coherent soundings story (which the media fails to do... they just move on to the next talking point) people take it as reality.

No matter how you feel politically the media is a big part of the divide issues in the U.S today. They have behaved horribly irresponsibly.

You cannot hold the media accountable for the lies of republicans? Modern media is profit-based and just reports on who said what. Unfortunately, this is not enough to keep people informed. And nobody can claim absolute truth anyways, though facts do exist and need to be recognized.

Who said anything about Republicans? I specifically mention the Iraq war.

No, that's not what media has been doing. And these are the results we get.

This isn't a partisan statement but a simple statement of cause and effect.

Iraq war was initiated by Republicans, despite world-wide protests and lack of evidence of WMDs.

True, but entirely irrelevant to the point being made.

Did you not read the post you respond to or are you just engaged in shallow partisan trolling? I can't decide.

If you'd like to ignore my point it's fine. But it's how it is. It's reality.

You failed to assert a backed-up argument about media though. They just report on events and opinions. Don't blame the mirror.

We now see maybe reporting people blatantly lying can be dangerous to democracy itself. There's no question which side is most manipulative, cynical and lying. It is classic psychopathic behaviour to blame others for own failings with baseless accusations. Fortunately we don't exist to serve the ego of one, and there's no basic right to provide a platform for lying and division.

If we fail to address lies, any side can turn on its own population without those checks and balances. It is never enough to tolerate abuse and lies, as humanity witnessed before.

If this was your point to, explaining in your own words may help.

I’d say Trump tapped into the sentiment of conspiracy theories by adding many of his own.

But in Europe, America have always been bigger and crazier, so it’s not a big surprise to hear about the conspiracy theories.

Hopefully the US can now move forward in a positive and constructive way, but the two-party system does seem to get in the way of improving things. Either you’re for or against, without any real middle ground.

If Biden can overcome that he is already on his way to become a great president.

> Glenn Greenwald

What is going on with him? I started following him in ~1997 when Salon.com was a burgeoning news site. He's taken some pretty extreme views since (essentially) expatriating.