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The entirety of Hunterpalooza is based on inference, implication, and leaps of logic, and because it is a complex story, the media is utterly incapable of making it comprehensible to the average news consumer. The consumer's takeaway is, "Hunter Biden must be corrupt because he is under investigation." That = mission accomplished for the GOP. Going back to the nothingburger of Hunter's tenure on the Burisma Board of Directors, the media "forgot" to mention that corporate board positions are routinely do-nothing jobs with phenomenal compensation. (John Boehner went from the House to the Board of RJ Reynolds where he was getting $400,000 a year. All Boehner knew about tobacco was that he liked to smoke it.) Many directors are named because of who they are, or what corporation they work for, and there is plenty of back-scratching. If the media was truly concerned with how it looks for a president's family member to cash in on the name they would have been all over Neil Bush, who never aspired to elected office because he was making too much money grifting in the private sector. I won't bother to elaborate on the laughably implausible "smoking gun" that Rudy Guilani wants everyone to believe the laptop to be other than to note the WaPo story's 13th paragraph mention that the experts hired to look at it said it was hopelessly compromised. And the media should have smelled a rat when The Former Guy did his appeal to Putin regarding Hunter Biden - the appeal to a murderous dictator wasn't the goal - the goal was to get a headline about Hunter Biden. Again, mission accomplished.

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NBC jumped on the bandwagon last night - “Hunter Biden investigation intensifies”. Let’s face it. Every news organization wants Trump to be President. Their profits and subscriptions skyrocketed the last time around. Greed drives the fourth estate.

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NBC nightly news jumped on the story last night. Their framing left the impression that Hunter Biden made millions in questionable deals with China, cheated on his taxes, and implied Joe Biden lied during the debates when he said Hunter had not made any money from China. No mention of where this is coming from or how questionable the evidence is.

And when the media returns Republicans to power, they will blame Democrats for poor messaging skills, paying the price for going too far left, and having Biden as a failed president.

Somewhere Jimmy Carter is having a deja vu moment.

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Rhandi Rhodes, on her show yesterday, reported that a poll showed that two thirds of Americans want Ketanji Brown Jackson confirmed as the new SCOTUS justice. Glenn Kirschner on his daily podcast outlined what he believed the DOJ is doing after several criminal indictments have come down against Trump "gang" members. The reports may tie together what's happening and why the latest MSM version of "But her emails" is nothing more than a desperate attempt to deflect just how fucked the Republicans are about to get. The good news here is that in the case of KBJ, the majority of the American public didn't buy into the child porn narrative the childish GOP attempted to weave during her Senate hearings. Rhodes pointed out that perhaps the constant MSMs normalization of GOP talking points has fallen on deaf ears. And according to Kirschner's podcast, it's likely that Merrick Garland and his DOJ are much smarter than we have given them credit for and have been able to keep the leaks away from, who Glenn likes to call, the leakers, the liars, and the lawyers. I don't know what's more sad, that the Republicans would think that beating this Hunter Biden dead horse story is actually going to save them or that much of the general public will believe it. For the first time in a long time, I'm hopeful that justice might be coming to Trump and this once political party that have almost gotten away with destroying our democracy. We'll see. In the meantime, I'm going use the Hunter Biden story frequency as a barometer for how close we are getting to seeing some serious shit hitting the Trump fan.

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It's bad enough that all of this stinks of a fishing expedition in search of a crime. It's also that there is a feeling conveyed by the press that a crime MUST exist and they're simply unable to find it.

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Let me know when the son of an ex-Vice President makes $640mm, like the son-in-law of a sitting President just did.

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So:

Hunter Biden did stuff

There is no evidence the President had any personal benefit.

The President is not being investigated

And, even after this long ass story, it’s entirely possible Hunter won’t even be charged.

Thanks Washington Post

Liberal bias my ass

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I forced myself to read Wapo’s Matt Viser piece y’day and concluded what is plain for all of us to see, ie NO THERE THERE. All that ink for not much, a hit job with no punch. I hadn’t known about the quasi coordinated stories among CNN et al or the likely well timed leaks by Rs to each of these media outlets. MSM are saps for these non stories, and Wapo has a black eye for obvious pandering to both sides reporting. MSM has lost so much credibility twisting themselves into pretzels in the interest of fairness??????’ Come on. MSM is just proving the point.

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"One White House reporter from CBS News, doing his best Fox News impression, asked if President Joe Biden would take the extraordinary step of pardoning Hunter — who is not accused of any crime."

It's like an investigator who starts a suspect's interrogation with 'So how long have you been beating your wife..."

Weird to see from professional "journalists." Totally in character for professional infotainers.

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What's particularly baffling to me is how anyone can draw conclusions at this point when, according to WAPO reporting, "people other than Hunter Biden had accessed the drive and written files to it, both before and after the initial stories in the New York Post and long after the laptop itself had been turned over to the FBI."

Can any of the information be validated? And if not, how is ANY of this newsworthy now? It's kinda like examining a crime scene at a busy subway station a week or two after the fact, no?

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Related - :/

@joshtpm: As you can see the reporters have literally internalized gop attack ads and their content as a central element of a news story even to the point of reporting the attacks, their intensity and success in advance of their even happening.

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Apr 1, 2022·edited Apr 1, 2022

You need read no further than the 6th graf of WaPo piece:

"The Post did not find evidence that Joe Biden personally benefited from or knew details about the transactions with CEFC, which took place after he had left the vice presidency and before he announced his intentions to run for the White House in 2020."

But you should read further, and sample the sidebar for a flavor of this thinnest of gruels in which they refer to the "purported hard drive." Purported? That's what passes for confirmation in a purported investigative piece with global dimensions? Aluminum nuclear tubes, anyone? Sych mealy mouthing would get a story spiked at any credible news organization.

But there's more! From the sidebar on how the Post sought to confirm the validity of the purported hard drive:

"The verifiable emails are a small fraction of 217 gigabytes of data provided to The Post on a portable hard drive by Republican activist Jack Maxey. He said the contents of the portable drive originated from Hunter Biden’s MacBook Pro, which Hunter reportedly dropped off at a computer repair shop in Wilmington, Del., in April 2019 and never reclaimed."

"The vast majority of the data — and most of the nearly 129,000 emails it contained — could not be verified by either of the two security experts who reviewed the data for The Post. Neither found clear evidence of tampering in their examinations, but some of the records that might have helped verify contents were not available for analysis, they said. The Post was able in some instances to find documents from other sources that matched content on the laptop that the experts were not able to assess."

"Among the reasons for the inconclusive findings was sloppy handling of the data, which damaged some records. The experts found the data had been repeatedly accessed and copied by people other than Hunter Biden over nearly three years."

"Most of the data obtained by The Post lacks cryptographic features that would help experts make a reliable determination of authenticity, especially in a case where the original computer and its hard drive are not available for forensic examination. Other factors, such as emails that were only partially downloaded, also stymied the security experts’ efforts to verify the content."

The reporting "is unlikely to resolve [the] debate, offering instead only the limited revelation that some of the data on the portable drive appears to be authentic. The security experts who examined the data for The Post struggled to reach definitive conclusions about the contents as a whole, including whether all of it originated from a single computer or could have been assembled from files from multiple computers and put on the portable drive."

No wonder Vince Foster killed himself.

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Something from Atrios on media logic that dictates why CBS has hired Mulvaney:

“The Business Of The News Business

Would also be bad, but I'm curious if similar decisions are made in the other direction. You know, the Dems are going to take charge so we need access to them!

No I'm not curious. They don't do that.

Back when Media Matters did guests studies of the Sunday shows, the excuses made were literally, "Republicans are in charge so our viewers need to hear what they think" and then "Democrats are in charge so we need to give viewers a chance to hear what Republicans think."

https://www.eschatonblog.com/2022/03/the-business-of-news-business.html

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It is hilarious how the media are pretending that nepotism is a new concept and is only being exploited by the Biden family. You know, because nepotism does not exist at the NYT, WaPo, WSJ and CNN. Also, where is this laptop? Who has it? Is there anything to it other than Rudy Giuliani talking about it non-stop since 2016?

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The buzzwords "Hunter Biden" and "China" in the same sentence make Republicans' hearts go pitter-patter. It doesn't matter that these were hotsy-totsy big money business deals that can be verified, and were. Nothing to see here, folks.

Was it a Freudian slip that the Washington Post stated in the article that their source for Hunter's emails and other garbage is what they termed a "Republican activist"? What the actual F is a Republican activist? I bet I can guess. Someone pitched this crap story to the major newspapers, starting with the NYT, whose story on the laptops popped up out of the trash bin last week, followed by the NY Post.

Biden's success in dealing with Ukraine, and the very serious stories about Ginni Thomas and those missing WH phone call logs, demanded a Trump-style "intervention." He's calling his acolytes and putting them to work.

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Notice the possible relationship between Eric's main article today and the Good Stuff. Is the press preparing itself for what they believe to be a republican takeover in the midterms? Time to appease the republicans with the Hunter Biden flop of a story because the republicans are apt to win?

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