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In October 2020, in the weeks leading up to the presidential election, the New York Post published an exclusive article about Hunter Biden, the son of then-presidential candidate Joe Biden. The article revealed part of the contents of a laptop abandoned in a Delaware garage, where text messages, emails, and intimate material compromising the now-President of the United States.
Despite the evidence that supports the tabloid’s journalistic material, The New York Times decided to qualify the report as “unsubstantiated.” But after receiving criticism for it, it eliminated the word from its article without leaving an editor’s note.
The Times deleted the word on Monday, explaining that the FEC ruled that Twitter did not violate election laws when it censored the New York Post when it banned the newspaper from tweet amid the release of the Hunter Biden laptop story.
Twitter’s decision to censor the tabloid, at first, was based on the grounds that the content may have been obtained through “hacking” which violated the platform’s rules; but that was never proven and, months later, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey himself said it was a “total mistake” to have censored the Post.
“The Federal Election Commission has dismissed Republican accusations that Twitter violated election laws in October by blocking people from posting links to an unsubstantiated New York Post article about Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s son Hunter Biden, in a decision that is likely to set a precedent for future cases involving social media sites and federal campaigns,” read the initial Times report that was later corrected without an editor’s note.
The proof that the Times called the Post story “unsubstained” or baseless is in a New York Times tweet of its own promoting news of the FEC’s decision. That tweet has not been deleted and has received a lot of criticism on the platform.
One of the criticisms was written by Jerry Dunleavy, who works as a researcher at the Washington Examiner: “This NYT article no longer calls it “unsubstantiated.” Where the original version said Twitter blocked people “from posting links to an unsubstantiated New York Post article” on Hunter Biden, newer version deleted word “unsubstantiated.” No editor’s note.”
“On what planet was this unsubstantiated?” criticized The Hill columnist Joe Concha for his part.
“The reason it was “unsubstantiated” was because major outlets, LIKE THE NEW YORK TIMES, refused to report on it,” said former communications adviser to former President Donald Trump, Tim Murtaugh.
New York Times accused of covering up for the Biden family
Different journalists on Twitter accused the NYT of wanting to cover up for President Biden’s son and the head of state himself, as that first New York Post article not only dealt with Hunter Biden’s shady business dealings abroad, but compromised Joe Biden’s claim that he knew nothing about his son’s business dealings and also put the then presidential candidate in a complicated conflict of interest situation.
The New York Post reported that “Hunter Biden introduced his father, then-Vice President Joe Biden, to a top executive at a Ukrainian energy firm less than a year before the elder Biden pressured government officials in Ukraine into firing a prosecutor who was investigating the company,” this according to emails obtained through the abandoned laptop in Delaware.
The media treatment of Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop by the traditional media was quite marked across editorial lines. Conservative media, such as Fox News, carried the New York Post story and also covered Big Tech’s censorship of the tabloid. In contrast, the liberal media, for the most part, tried to deny, disqualify or simply ignore the exclusive reporting and also the obvious episode of censorship against the Post, one of America’s oldest and most historic news outlets.
The laptop source of all the information about Hunter Biden’s business dealings abroad is still the subject of much controversy. The British newspaper Daily Mail has a certified copy of the hard disk and has been revealing exclusive material about Hunter’s intimate life, such as his drug addiction, his complex relationship with his father or his predisposition to hire escort ladies and record pornographic videos.
For its part, the FBI has since 2019 a seized laptop that apparently belongs to Hunter Biden. The president’s son was asked about this computer in an interview with CBS News and dodged all inquiries, but admitted that the laptop could indeed be his.
There could be a laptop out there that was stolen from me,” Hunter Biden said in the interview. “It could be that I was hacked. It could be that it was the — that it was Russian intelligence. It could be that it was stolen from me. Or that there was a laptop stolen from me.”
Likewise, the New York Times also earned criticism because the FEC, despite favoring Twitter, did not use the term “unsubstantiated” to refer to the New York Post‘s investigative news story according to sources consulted by Chuck Ross, investigative reporter for the Washington Free Beacon.
“A source familiar with this ruling tells me that the FEC does not call the Biden laptop article “unsubstantiated.” That’s NYT’s language,” the reporter wrote.
Emmanuel Alejandro Rondón is a journalist at El American specializing in the areas of American politics and media analysis // Emmanuel Alejandro Rondón es periodista de El American especializado en las áreas de política americana y análisis de medios de comunicación.
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