A smug and arrogant conference on disinformation got more than it bargained for
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As I observed here and here, it was staggering to watch how the American media first promoted the unfounded smear that President Donald Trump was in hock to the Russians; then ignored the mounting evidence that this was instead an unprecedented conspiracy, involving elements of law enforcement in cahoots with the Democratic party, to lever Trump out of office; and then proceeded to bury incriminating evidence linking Hunter Biden and his father Joe to corruption in Ukraine.
The New York Post reported in 2020 that Hunter Biden had 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.
Incriminating emails detailing this scandal were said to have been contained in a massive trove of data recovered from Hunter Biden’s laptop computer. Both the computer and hard drive were seized by the FBI after the shop’s owner said he alerted agents to their existence.
An explosive story in the run-up to the 2020 presidential election in which Biden Senior was the Democratic candidate? Of course not. With the exception of the Wall Street Journal, the US media yawned and constructed elaborate reasons why this was just fake news.
Nothing to see here, move along there. As the WSJ’s James Freeman reported:
“We don’t want to waste our time on stories that are not really stories, and we don’t want to waste the listeners’ and readers’ time on stories that are just pure distractions,” NPR Managing Editor for News Terence Samuel told me. “And quite frankly, that’s where we ended up, this was … a politically driven event and we decided to treat it that way.”
Well guess what — this was not a story that wasn’t really a story. It was true. And a few weeks ago, no less than the two principal horsepeople of the anti-Trump apocalypse, the New York Times and Washington Post, admitted this. As Gerard Baker wrote in the WSJ:
It took its time, but last week the New York Times slipped the acknowledgment of the story’s accuracy deep in a report about Hunter Biden’s mounting legal problems. The Times, along with most other mass-circulation news organisations, had essentially ignored the story in the days when it might have made a difference, but it now says it has “authenticated” the laptop’s contents.
The concession from the paper, which serves as a sort of unofficial licensing authority for reporting by most of the rest of the media, prompted a predictable rush to self-vindication by those who had also trashed the story at the time. The Washington Post insisted its original decision not to touch it was justified because of uncertainty about its provenance.
Normally, when there is doubt about the provenance of an explosive story, news organisations consider it their job to ascertain the truth. Normally, it takes them less than 17 months to do so. But normally they don’t have the cover provided by technology companies that prevented people from reading the original story.
Last week, The Atlantic magazine held a conference at the University of Chicago on “Disinformation and the Erosion of Democracy”. Whenever the liberal media tackles this topic, the disinformation they complain about is never their own corrupt practices (perish the thought) but the “fake news” put out by those of whom they disapprove — aka conservatives.
This time, though, the right-on Atlantic hosts got more than they bargained for. This was because a University of Chicago student actually asked… journalistic questions about the media’s behaviour.
Daniel Schmidt, of the student newspaper Chicago Thinker, asked The Washington Post’s Anne Applebaum why she had written in 2020, on the subject of the New York Post’s scoop about Hunter Biden’s laptop:
Those who live outside the Fox News bubble do not of course need to learn any of the stuff about Hunter Biden.
As the Chicago Thinker itself reports:
Schmidt continued, “Now, of course, we know a few weeks ago The New York Times confirmed that the [laptop] content is real. Do you think the media acted inappropriately when they instantly dismissed Hunter Biden’s laptop as Russian disinformation? And what can we learn from that in ensuring that what we label as disinformation is truly disinformation and not reality?”
Applebaum dismissed Schmidt’s concerns, explaining, “My problem with Hunter Biden’s laptop is, I think, [it’s] totally irrelevant. I mean it’s not whether it’s disinformation — I don’t think Hunter Biden’s business relationships have anything to do with who should be president of the United States. So, I don’t find it to be interesting.”
This high-handed contempt for objectivity, and the arrogant refusal to acknowledge let alone express regret for the betrayal of journalism involved in the suppression of the Hunter Biden story in the run-up to the 2020 election, justifiably went viral on social media.
To cap it all, the Atlantic’s editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg even declared that this criticism of the attitude on display at the conference was itself the result of… disinformation. He said:
I think one darkly humorous, but inevitable measurement of our success is that our disinformation conference has been the subject of disinformation campaigns on social media already.
You really couldn’t make this up, could you?
For his part, Schmidt told the Thinker:
Applebaum’s response is yet another testament to our ruling class’ contempt for what the average American cares about. People like her do not actually care about fighting “disinformation”— they merely throw the term around when it satisfies their political goals. Her refusal to answer my question demonstrates that.
With this attitude, Schmidt deserves to go far in quality journalism. Unfortunately, there’s no longer much of that left.
When Donald Trump became president, the Washington Post infamously added to its masthead the rubric
Democracy dies in darkness.
As the Post and other mainstream media have shown, it has indeed — but the darkness in which it has died is their own.
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