floridafan
Verified User
In the course of one week, we’ve moved from The New York Post’s supposed “blockbuster” proving that Hunter Biden had arranged a meeting between an official with Burisma Holdings, the Ukrainian gas company whose board the younger Biden sat on, and then-Vice President Joe Biden to a contrived controversy over Twitter banning the story from its platform because it contained personal email addresses and phone numbers and we ended up with reports about Rudy Giuliani’s apparent involvement in a clumsy scheme to launder hacked emails through a Seth Rich-truther at a computer shop, the likelihood that the emails were forged and the FBI investigating the whole thing as a disinformation campaign undertaken by foreign adversaries. When they rolled out the “story” on Monday, they probably didn’t expect headlines like “Rudy: Only ‘50/50’ Chance I Worked With a ‘Russian Spy’ to Dig Dirt on Bidens” to be prevalent by Saturday.
One should keep in mind that while the conservative media have run dozens of stories this week with “smoking gun” in their headlines, there’s absolutely nothing here. That Hunter Biden leveraged his family name and connections he’d made at Yale to land a cushy directorship is sleazy but not illegal, unethical or uncommon among wealthy and powerful families. Burisma was a shady operation, and both Hunter and Joe Biden have acknowledged it was a bad decision for that reason, but the nontroversy rests on the entirely false claim that Hunter’s association with Burisma played some role in the Obama administration’s efforts, along with those of their European allies, to persuade the Ukrainian government to remove Viktor Shokin, the country’s corrupt top prosecutor. And nothing “revealed” this week, by the New York Post (or other outlets like Breitbart), adds any weight to the previously debunked claim.
And while the legacy media have taken a lot of justifiable criticism for their coverage of the Trump presidency, this episode shows that they have learned a thing or two. Peter Schweizer, the former Breitbart editor, got a ton of mainstream coverage of his Uranium One non-scandal in 2016, even after it had been widely debunked. This time, the press has not only treated a similarly fact-free smear with appropriate skepticism, it’s pursued the story of how it came to be. That’s a significant change.
continued
https://www.rawstory.com/2020/10/tr...udo-scandal-backfired-on-them-in-record-time/
One should keep in mind that while the conservative media have run dozens of stories this week with “smoking gun” in their headlines, there’s absolutely nothing here. That Hunter Biden leveraged his family name and connections he’d made at Yale to land a cushy directorship is sleazy but not illegal, unethical or uncommon among wealthy and powerful families. Burisma was a shady operation, and both Hunter and Joe Biden have acknowledged it was a bad decision for that reason, but the nontroversy rests on the entirely false claim that Hunter’s association with Burisma played some role in the Obama administration’s efforts, along with those of their European allies, to persuade the Ukrainian government to remove Viktor Shokin, the country’s corrupt top prosecutor. And nothing “revealed” this week, by the New York Post (or other outlets like Breitbart), adds any weight to the previously debunked claim.
And while the legacy media have taken a lot of justifiable criticism for their coverage of the Trump presidency, this episode shows that they have learned a thing or two. Peter Schweizer, the former Breitbart editor, got a ton of mainstream coverage of his Uranium One non-scandal in 2016, even after it had been widely debunked. This time, the press has not only treated a similarly fact-free smear with appropriate skepticism, it’s pursued the story of how it came to be. That’s a significant change.
continued
https://www.rawstory.com/2020/10/tr...udo-scandal-backfired-on-them-in-record-time/
