Hacker News Reader

Comment by readthenotes1 | Hacker News Reader

Indeed.

A litmus test for recent journalism is the hunter Biden laptop story.

And the reason is that most journalists nowadays believe that presenting other views is harmful[1]

Most boomers and their children grew up in an unusual period in news when broad and balanced coverage was expected, and even somewhat required in the TV news. "Yellow journalism" is back, though, and we haven't quite adjusted (compare abc news coverage of Biden's plagiarism and lying in the 1980s to their coverage of his mental decline during his presidency)

[1]https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2022/07/13/u-s-journ...

View on HN

> A litmus test for recent journalism is the hunter Biden laptop story.

It's really not. Stories about the families of politicians are better suited for tabloids. They're a distraction at best.

And let's be honest: only a total ignoramus would vote or change their vote based on Hunter Biden. There are a million better reasons.

Tabloids? Not when 51 intelligence professionals sign a letter, claiming the laptop to be false when in fact it was not. I think the laptop story is a classic example of why people distrust a journalists. You had many media outlets, backed by government officials, essentially covering up for Hunter Biden and lying to the public. The laptop exists. It's contents exist. But for years all we heard was that this was a false flag operation from Russia.

That was a lie

> Not when 51 intelligence professionals sign a letter, claiming the laptop to be false when in fact it was not.

No, that's not what they said. Here's what they said: "We want to emphasize that we do not know if the emails, provided to the New York Post by President Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani, are genuine or not and that we do not have evidence of Russian involvement -- just that our experience makes us deeply suspicious that the Russian government played a significant role in this case." https://www.politico.com/f/?id=00000175-4393-d7aa-af77-579f9...

> The laptop exists. It's contents exist.

So what?

Several Republican-led Congressional committees found no wrongdoing by Joe Biden in the matter. So yes, it's nothing but a tabloid story.

The cynicism in the 51s statement is what's wrong. And the media taking the expected cynical take. The 51 can say we didn't say it was fake we simply strongly implied it. And the media reported the implied lie. The media is either ignorant or more likely complicit.

> And the media reported the implied lie.

The media reports a million lies verbatim, because politicians lie.

These 51 intelligence professionals were not supposed to be politicians, they are supposed to be "experts" in the field.

The laptop has emails communications showing that Hunter Biden was claiming that Joe Biden was involved in his business deals, contrary to what Joe Biden was saying.

That was known to any journalists who chose not to report on it

It was reported on at the time.

At the time there were two clear and obvious issues; the provenance was sketchy (material may easily have been added or deleted), and the source (Hunter) was a drug addict.

The "Yeah, my dad's totally on board with this" suffered from both, it may have been fake material added to discredit Biden (hindsight suggests not) OR (just as damning) it's the utterance of a crackhead bignoting an endeavour for credability.

What followed was one partisan media wing endlessly blowing up nothing of substance into a fabricated conspiracy, the other arm either ignoring the nothing of substance or lamely addressing why it was nothing.

You yourself acknowledge this in the framing you used: "showing that Hunter Biden was claiming that .."

The two problematic italics were precisely why knowledgable and honest journalists chose to not endlessly report on it.

Journalists would have worked in your italicized parts, not busy the story

Yeah, they did work the italicized parts at the time .. with a sketchy evidence chain chasing back to the emails of a drug addict that was pretty much it for the day for journalists .. the new day saw plenty more stories with actual meat on the bone.

That's an example of a story not going anywhere, it's commonplace.

What is less common is partisan hacks circling back like a dog to its own vomit and spending months of news cycles pumping up a cardboard outline as a real live bit of news.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com