The Chris Moeller Archives

Pretending at journalism

There remains no more doubt that the major corporate news media, with very few and mostly "right wing" exceptions, is engaged in a blatant cover-up of the Hunter Biden/Burisma scandal and doing so in an effort to protect Hunter's father. Though the FBI is now actively investigating the younger Biden for racketeering-- an indisputable fact, organizations like Jeff Bezos' Washington Post, the New York Times, NBC/MSNBC, and CNN have determined that not only are the questions surrounding the story irrelevant, but that the candidate Biden should not have to answer to them. Journalists and editors have been bending over backwards with excuses to justify Biden's ongoing silence. The goal, of course, is to avoid repeating a well-reported spectacle of 2016 and a lie told over and over then and since that Hillary Clinton should not have been painted with the brush of criminality for having shielded American citizens from the details of her public work (via email) as head of the Department of State. This resolution, which was made officially or unofficially, in concert or not in concert with one another, is that there would not for a second time be an "October Surprise" permitted to boost the Trump campaign in 2020 even if there were an "October Surprise." 

It should be noted that neither Joe nor Hunter Biden have denied the charges that have sprung up from a story in the New York Post over a week ago. The Post published numerous texts and emails supposedly to have been written by Hunter Biden to members of the Burisma board of directors confirming an effort he was making to persuade his father to use the offices of the Vice Presidency of the United States to aid in their business interests. Though there is no proof that a deal between Burisma and the elder Biden was ever consummated, there are texts and emails (again not denied by the Bidens) that show Hunter was adamant with his new business colleagues that any discussions that did involve the vice president be held only verbally and never put into writing. An article published last week by long-time Rolling Stone reporter Matt Taibbi provided documentation that Joe's attempts to replace a Ukrainian prosecutor in 2015 directly benefited the Burisma company.

We're left to believe-- from the words of the Democratic Party's presidential nominee-- that Biden Jr., a recovering cocaine addict who was drummed out of the military, was hired by a Ukrainian oil company based on merit and not on the strength of his last name and not on his government connections that reached all the way into the Obama Oval Office. When Donald Trump Jr. says this story would be front and center in the New York Times if the name in the story were his and not Hunter's, it's impossible to argue the point. 

The news organizations suppressing the story claim the materials obtained have not been "fact checked" and have not been sourced, although the New York Times, as just one example, has published Donald Trump's tax returns without knowing their source. In 2016, someone unknown still to all of us, including the editors at the Times dropped a copy of his returns into the mail addressed to the Times newsroom and they have since been scoured over and published. Simultaneously, these news outlets, some of the most powerful in the country, have suggested that the Burisma documents are part of a "Russian disinformation" plot, although they have no evidence of this either and U.S. intelligence officials have stated that there is no known evidence. A Washington Post op-ed claimed that "we must treat the Hunter Biden leaks as if they were a foreign intelligence operation-- even if they probably weren't." Wow. On CNN, Christiane Amanpour, when asked by a member of the Republican National Committee to cover the story, replied, "We're not going to do your work for you." Again, wow.

Biden calls it a smear, without going further into specifics, and his team referred to it as an attack against Biden's "only living son," a sleazy reprieve of the candidate's ongoing tendency to pimp his other son, the dead one, during his campaign. When Joe tells Lesley Stahl on 60 Minutes that he "gives you (his) word as a Biden," it's only natural for some of us to ask what that name is worth-- and how long and in what ways it's been used as currency. 

Glenn Greenwald, who left his position this week at the Intercept, a news organization he co-founded, because the editors demanded "softening" changes to stories he filed on this topic, submitted nine questions to the Biden campaign to which they have yet to reply, including, and I paraphrase...

1. Does he claim the emails or texts released by the Post are fabricated?

2. Does he know if Hunter did indeed drop off laptops at the Delaware repair store (where these documents were reportedly sourced)?

3. Did Hunter ever ask him to meet with Burisma executives and did he?

4. Did Joe ever know about business proposals in Ukraine or China being pursued by his son (and brother) in which Joe was a proposed participant?

5. How could Joe justify expending so much energy as VP traveling to Kiev and demanding that the Ukrainian General Prosecutor be fired, and why was the replacement a crony of the Ukrainian president with no previous legal experience? And was this action of demanding the firing in exchange for keeping open the tap of $1 billion in U.S. aid (which Biden once admitted and even bragged about doing in a speech) really done to combat corruption in Ukraine and not to benefit this private company? (The Taibbi report strongly supports the view that there were major antagonisms between the prosecutor and Burisma before his firing.) 

The national news media, along with Facebook, and particularly Twitter-- the primary source of information for people in politics-- have completely silenced the report-- and done so during the month that directly precedes the national election. Twitter has taken the extraordinary step of locking the account of the New York Post because it has been leading the charge on this story. The Post is the oldest newspaper in the country (founded by Alexander Hamilton) and currently the 4th largest. Again, neither of the Bidens has even disputed the facts of the story nor the claim that Hunter took his laptop to this repair store, where they eventually wound up in the hands of Rudy Giuliani. It's out of bounds for all of these outlets to label this "disinformation" when nothing has been issued to dispute the authenticity. The story of three laptops being left at a repair shop owned by a friend of Giuliani is unusual and suspicious, but why aren't the Bidens denying then that Hunter ever did this?

The suppression is what makes it worse. Generally, truths, when they're affirmative in one's telling, do not get suppressed. We're fools if we believe that Joe did not know his son was trading on his name to benefit himself financially even if he was not directly involved himself. The "promise" of getting access to Joe was the crime Hunter committed. That's a major problem even in the unlikely scenario in which that's all this story was. There's no proof that Joe was in on it, but we're left to conclude that he did because of what has transpired since with his obfuscation. It takes a lot of gumption for his supporters to continue calling Trump supporters "sheep" when they're doing it during a wholesale cover-up of a Biden family criminal hustle. 

It's not just this story. As Trump said to Stahl last weekend for their CBS broadcast interview, Biden has gotten nothing about softball questions from the news media. It was establishment Democrats, during the primaries, that first raised the issue of Biden's cognitive decline-- not Trump and not Bernie Sanders. As recently as this week, Biden referred to Trump as "George," saying "another four years of George," presumably fading back to George W. Bush, but maybe it was even the George before that. We're just going to ignore anything that could potentially damage the candidate. Twitter and social media were the only "independent" and wide open platforms for information, with no info there needing to be "blessed" by the political powers-that-be, and of course, that has now been erased and we're told that we can't trust what is truly independent-- and truly democratic. Populism, as we wrote last month, is the new bogeyman. If the opposition to Trump is the corporate press and the tech platforms, we're screwed for sure.

We're forced to return to 2016 and to recall that this same thing happened with Hillary Clinton. When she was bowled over by defeat on election night, the blame for the loss did not go to the candidate herself or to her campaign team as it should have, but to James Comey, the head of the FBI, for having had the gall to re-open an investigation into Clinton's email suppression during the month preceding the election. It's an ongoing strategy to blame the messenger, to blame the leaker, to blame the whistleblower when actual crimes are revealed. Clinton committed a crime and she did so on purpose-- she conducted business for the State Department on private email servers so that the facts of what she was doing would not be accessible to open records law. If that was not the intent of what she was doing, it was at least the fortunate outcome. We can only assume then that her illegal act was conducted to disguise even more illegal or unethical acts. This is also the story of Julian Assange, jailed in Britain and awaiting possible extradition to the U.S. for the offense of leaking proof of our military's war crimes in the Middle East, as well as the story of Edward Snowden, still under protection in Russia after several years for exposing illegal eavesdropping conducted on all of us by the National Security Agency. We wind up with a situation in which the exposers are hounded and/or sit in prison with no focus paid to the crimes that these whistleblowers-- these heroes-- have exposed. FBI director James Clapper lied directly to Congress when he told the body that we didn't engage in what Snowden later revealed we did, but nothing has ever happened to Clapper. Today, he's a highly-paid analyst on CNN.

Like in 2016, reporters and editors are willfully forgetting their ethics because 1) they want Trump to lose, almost universally so, and 2) because they live and work in a social environment in which they're fearful of being accused, as some of them were in 2016, of helping Trump to win. But neither should be their fucking concern! It's pathetic to witness such cowardice. It's a legitimate concern today, unfortunately, that you can be de-platformed and knocked off Twitter for the offense of what amounts to doing your job to the utmost, but some of us gave up real careers in journalism because we believed in never making this compromise of pursuing truth for the sake of financial and careerist opportunism. To repeat, Greenwald just had to leave a news organization that he founded because they were suppressing his accurate and pointed reporting, and he refused to succumb to it.

It's very possible that this Burisma information was hacked and not acquired via the computer repair store, as we have been told, but it doesn't matter if a crime was committed to bring contents like this to public light. As a fundamental principle, only two questions are ever to be asked when deciding to go ahead with a story: 1) Is the information authentic? and 2) Is it in the public interest? This is how we were able to read the Pentagon Papers, the WikiLeaks cables, and the Snowden NSA documents. And of course, the irony is that reporters make lucrative careers in Washington based on "leaks," but they're typically the ones given out by anonymous CIA spooks and skeezy insiders that protect the establishment. It's a defense actually of the claim of "fake news." If you accept these verdicts about what's legitimate news from these organizations without a large-sized grain of salt, you are being irrational. 

Meanwhile, Trump resurges in the polls during the final three weeks of the campaign while making none of his arguments louder or more vehemently than the one he's been making consistently for four years, and the one-- to me-- that he's made most convincingly-- that the traditional news media and the Washington political establishment are conspiring against him. Any sensible American, even against a wave of opposition by "talking heads" on their televisions and phones, should be able to appreciate that these news agencies are concocting excuses not to report on this story. It's not just the old grey lady news outlets either. It's the supposedly left-wing independent media that is so in the tank for Biden that they can't see the harm they're doing-- to their future, to our future, and even to Biden directly. As Taibbi and Greenwald, two beacons by direct contrast, have both pointed out this week, "The whole point is that the press loses its way when it cares more about who benefits from information than whether it's true." 

posted by CM @ 5:18 PM