NPR says it ‘won’t waste readers’ time’ on Biden emails ‘non-story’ – after happily parroting anti-Trump agitprop

22 Oct, 2020 17:14 / Updated 4 years ago

NPR has outright refused to cover the still-developing Hunter Biden emails scandal, calling the story “a distraction.” The publicly funded radio network was slammed for apparently protecting Joe Biden.

A tranche of emails released by the New York Post last week alleges that Hunter Biden – son of Democratic candidate Joe Biden – traded access to his father with Ukrainian energy tycoons, sought deals for his family in China, and kicked a share of his foreign profits up to Joe, all whilst Joe was vice president of the US. The allegations fly in the face of Joe Biden’s insistence that he knew nothing of his son’s foreign dealings.

Also on rt.com Hunter’s business partner CONFIRMS authenticity of laptop email, claims Joe Biden was part of Chinese deals

Links to the Post’s story were censored by both Facebook and Twitter, and ignored by most of the mainstream media – except when they called it “Russian disinformation” and cast doubt on the emails’ authenticity. Conservatives speculated that media outlets were burying the story to aid Biden’s election bid, and NPR on Thursday admitted its bias against the story.

“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 distraction,” read a statement from NPR’s news editor, Terence Samuels.

Samuels was savaged for his admission. “Just be honest and say you won’t report any stories that reflect poorly on Biden because you believe it’s so vital that Trump lose,” journalist Glenn Greenwald tweeted.

Joe Biden’s campaign has not denied that the emails are authentic, and a former business associate of Hunter, Tony Bobulinski, has called them “genuine.” Furthermore, Bobulinski has confirmed that “the big guy,” mentioned in one email exchange as the beneficiary of a payout from a venture with a Chinese energy company, is Joe Biden.

“The Biden family aggressively leveraged the Biden family name to make millions of dollars from foreign entities even though some were from communist controlled China,” Bobulinski said on Wednesday.

While NPR is apparently content to ignore the mounting evidence against Biden, the network has eagerly reported unverified and false stories before, albeit ones damaging to President Donald Trump. 

The network gave airtime to the security firm behind the salacious and false ‘Steele Dossier’ to warn of “Russian efforts to sow discord,” and reported every twist and turn in the two-year ‘Russiagate’ saga. NPR ran a series of stories based on the completely unconfirmed and Pentagon-denied report that Russia paid Taliban fighters in Afghanistan to kill American troops, and on an uncorroborated report that the president called fallen soldiers “suckers” and “losers.”

NPR may be willingly ignoring the Hunter Biden story, but other outlets are working hard to smother it. As the Washington Post beat the Biden campaign to debunking the story, MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough called it “made up” and a “hokey story,” while NBC’s Hailie Jackson called it “dubious” and "questionably sourced.”

The New York Post was given a hard drive containing the emails by Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s attorney. Giuliani in turn claims he was given the drive by a computer repair shop in Delaware, after a laptop was abandoned there by Hunter Biden last year.

With the Biden campaign yet to deny the story, Giuliani said on Tuesday night that he’s handed the drive over to Delaware police, after discovering “numerous pictures of underage girls” and other “very sensitive” material on it.

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