Pretty much anyone who was paying attention during and after the 2020 election knows the media suppressed stories about the Hunter Biden laptop that broke just before the election.
Two former top Politico reporters admitted on a podcast this week that their ex-employer participated in the suppression, killing stories that were negative to Biden and telling reporters not to write them.
Marc Caputo, now with Axios, and Tara Palmeri, now with Puck, discussed the circumstances on Palmeri's "Somebody's Gotta Win" podcast earlier in the week.
Caputo acknowledged that the press has lost much of the public trust it had, giving the laptop story as an example.
“Politico did that terrible, ill-fated headline: 51 intelligence agents, or former intelligence agents, say that the Hunter Biden laptop was disinformation, or bore the hallmarks of disinformation. Turns out that story was closer to disinformation because the Hunter Biden laptop appeared to be true,” he observed.
Caputo jumped in to say that it wasn't just Politico; Facebook and Twitter censored stories about the laptop and even shut down the New York Post's account for a week to keep the October surprise from getting out to a wider audience.
“I was covering Biden at the time, and I remember coming to my editor and saying, ‘Hey, we need to write about the Hunter Biden laptop,’" he said. "And I was told this came from on high at Politico: Don’t write about the laptop, don’t talk about the laptop, don’t tweet about the laptop. And the only thing Politico wound up writing was that piece that called it disinformation, which charitably could be called misinformation, at the least.”
“Yeah, I mean, I had a hard time — you know I wrote some pretty serious reporting on Hunter Biden, which actually ended up getting him prosecuted — the story on the gun” replied Palmeri.
Palmeri said she spent three months--during the Biden transition and the beginning of his presidency--investigating the laptop story, but got very little interest in publishing it because Politico's higher-ups didn't want to hurt Biden during the "honeymoon period."
"I had everything, you know, the police reports, every, like, you know, I’m a solid reporter. But I do wonder if it could have, if it would have been published a little quicker if it was a different type of story,” Palmeri mused.
Caputo then said he pursued a story in 2019 about the tax lien on Hunter Biden's work for Burisma, but got nowhere with it at the time.
“That story was killed by the editors, and they gave no explanation for that either,” he said. “So that general experience, you know, obviously the public doesn’t know about those things, but as a reporter having witnessed the way in which the two candidates-”
“We just get called, like, ‘the terrible mainstream media.’ It’s like you don’t understand the process there,” Palmeri put in.
“Well, you also don’t understand the dumb decisions of cowardly editors that are made above us,” Caputo agreed.
