One of my personal aphorisms is that we see the world from where we stand. For example, an educated elitist may believe that most people need a college education. A young urban dweller may think that automobile ownership is a luxury.  A person who is left of center politically typically sees a person at the center as being on the right and sees those on the far left as moderates.  Every person is biased. Failure to recognize this constant of human nature leads either to gullibility or dogmatism. Many studies looking at various metrics over the years have shown that most media people dwell on the political left. A group of people that have a similar political worldview is likely to make decisions often without intent ranging from content to vocabulary that demonstrates this leftward bias. That’s rational and also reflects what I had perceived before Mr. Trump came to Washington. My belief that media bias was largely unintentional was shattered by the Hunter Biden laptop scandal.

First, I should point out that a large chunk of Americans believe that the scandal is misinformation, a fiction created by Russian intelligence, the GRU, to disrupt our democratic process. My summary follows. A laptop was left at a repair shop. Many months later, the shop owner sold the old device as abandoned material, which act was legal. The buyer found that it contains material indicating the previous owner was a grifter of sorts, a man who sold access to his father, a former US senator and the current Democratic Party nominee for president, to several questionable or even frankly hostile governments through business ventures. New York Post reporters gained access to this trove of information and spend weeks vetting it before it was published two weeks before the presidential election. The material supported a former business associate who provided documentary support and testimony that the son and his father reaped millions of dollars of profit from a company tied to the communist leadership of China.

A normal news outlet would cover this astonishing breaking news story. Instead, the vast majority of media buried it, just as they had largely suppressed the video of Vice President Joe Biden threatening to withhold $1 billion of foreign aid from Ukraine if they failed to fire the prosecutor investigating his son and the company that hired him. Social media and search engines hid the NY Post laptop story. The reason given for keeping this information away from the public was that it was not only false but an intelligence operation of the Russian GRU. Former CIA director John Brennan said, “It has all the hallmarks of a Russian disinformation campaign.” What media people heard Brennan say, however, was that the story was Russian disinformation. 

The CIA is a great place for clever liars and we appreciate them there, when they are working to keep us safe but not when they are misleading the country, using intel-ops in support of a personal political agenda. The entire Russia Hoax of 2016 – 2020, has all the hallmarks of a John Brennan operation, since it began with his CIA assets as soon as Trump became a nominee. By leveraging Trump’s ill-advised sycophantic approach to Vladimir Putin, Democrat leaders were able to give the Russia  hoax credibility. To be clear, there are still millions of Americans, including Hillary Clinton and Adam Schiff, who still cling to the precept that Donald Trump is a Russian agent and that Russian oligarchs control him, possibly through blackmail or perhaps through some secret club. This notion provided the platform to claim the laptop was a Russian plant. Brennan and others only needed to keep the story out of public view until the election was past or, failing that, make the story another Russian ploy to keep Trump in office.

However, the laptop did not mysteriously appear; that it belonged to Hunter Biden was confirmed in several ways. Much of the laptop material was verified by secondary sources. A former business partner of Hunter Biden’s, who provided a great deal of the hard evidence confirming Biden’s ownership of the laptop, produced additional hard evidence and testimony of questionable dealings by the Biden clan. The partner, as I understand, was not a Republican and not a fan of Donald Trump. 

A pathetic tale of a profligate son grifting on his famous and powerful father’s coattails would normally sell a lot of copy. What was the compelling motivation to suppress this titillating tale of corruption at the height of the father’s campaign? Patriotism or partisanship? Was it elitist patronizing, or the media puppet masters deciding what string to pull? Regardless of reason, suppressing the story was intentional interference with our basic democratic process, honestly informed voting. The left got the electoral result they wanted.