As the Wall Street Journal quipped in an editorial, the information only appeared in the 24th paragraph of a report published on page 20 of the New York Times: “The emails were authenticated by people familiar with them and with the investigation.”
The NYT confirmed the authenticity one year and five months after the publication, by the New York Post, of the emails from Hunter Biden, Biden’s son – which showed the future president’s links, then campaigning, with the Ukrainian gas company he had hired. Hunter as a lobbyist.
As the NY Post claimed in a headline the next day (above), making a play on the NYT slogan: “All the news you can print… after Biden is elected.”
Fox News, from the same pro-Republican group as the WSJ and Post, edited and broadcast a video with several passages in which its pro-Democrat competitors CNN and MSNBC had claimed that Hunter’s emails were “Russian disinformation.”
It was not newspapers and channels that “banned” information that could have changed the election. But his fight against the news, in October 2020, spurred Facebook and Twitter to action to suppress it on the platforms. Months later, they canceled Donald Trump for good.
In the title of one of the texts published now by the NY Post, which does not hide its anger, “How Democrats, the media and Big Tech worked together to bury the story about Hunter Biden”.
porters
At the time, the NYT’s own media columnist, Ben Smith, identified the episode as a milestone in the return to power of major newspapers as “gatekeepers”, information gatekeepers, agenda controllers in the US. Along with platforms, he added.
ON THE OTHER HAND
On Sunday, the NYT published the editorial “America has a free speech problem”, questioning the “cancel culture”, especially on social media platforms. And with one target in particular:
“Many progressives have become intolerant of those who express other opinions and have taken on a kind of self-righteousness and censorship that the right has long displayed.”
Announced a project to identify and combat threats to freedom of expression. The reaction was broad and negative.
