A senior editor at NPR admitted in an op-ed that the outlet turned a blind eye to the Hunter Biden laptop story in 2020 due to its political implications shortly before the election, despite the story being newsworthy as it revealed Hunter’s business dealings with corrupt foreign interests.
While 51 former intelligence officials claimed it was Russian disinformation, the laptop was confirmed to be real and its contents verified over a year later.
“In October 2020, the New York Post published the explosive report about the laptop Hunter Biden abandoned at a Delaware computer shop containing emails about his sordid business dealings. With the election only weeks away, NPR turned a blind eye. Here’s how NPR’s managing editor for news at the time explained the thinking: ‘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,'” Berliner wrote.
However, the editor said NPR did not acknowledge its mistake in dismissing the story.
He lamented how NPR has shifted leftward over time and become more advocacy-driven after Trump’s election, such as hitching to Rep. Adam Schiff who promoted the Russia collusion hoax.
“But it wasn’t a pure distraction, or a product of Russian disinformation, as dozens of former and current intelligence officials suggested. The laptop did belong to Hunter Biden. Its contents revealed his connection to the corrupt world of multimillion-dollar influence peddling and its possible implications for his father,” he wrote.
“The laptop was newsworthy. But the timeless journalistic instinct of following a hot story lead was being squelched. During a meeting with colleagues, I listened as one of NPR’s best and most fair-minded journalists said it was good we weren’t following the laptop story because it could help Trump,” he wrote.
The editor also criticized NPR’s failure to admit error in uncritically supporting the collusion claims before they were debunked.
The op-ed was a stark admission and critique of NPR’s bias and lack of transparency on politically sensitive stories.
“When the essential facts of the Post’s reporting were confirmed and the emails verified independently about a year and a half later, we could have fessed up to our misjudgment. But, like Russia collusion, we didn’t make the hard choice of transparency,” he wrote.
