Topic: Media Research Center
The Media Research Center's Hunter Biden Derangement Syndrome continued with a Washington Post report on what could be confirmed as authentic -- and, just as importantly, what couldn't -- on Hunter Biden's alleged laptop. Naturally, Curtis Houck was quick to declare victory in a March 30 post:
Late Wednesday morning, The Washington Post decided that, as our Tim Graham tweeted, Democracy Has a Sunrise instead of Dying in Darkness as reporters Matt Viser, Tom Hamburger, and Craig Timberg published two bombshell articles acknowledging the existence of the infamous Hunter Biden laptop and detailing the First Son’s life of corruption as it relates to a Chinese energy company.
The trio’s admission came a year and a half after the laptop was first exposed by the New York Post and a full-court press and open collusion ensued between Big Tech, the liberal media, and the Biden campaign to censor and silence those who merely shared the New York paper’s groundbreaking story.
[...]
“Here’s how The Post analyzed Hunter Biden’s laptop” came first and did what the Daily Caller was able to do back on October 29, 2020, which was analyzed to verify its validity as “unquestionably authentic.”
Actually, the Daily Caller claimed to confirm the authenticity of only a single email, not the entire laptop -- and given its reputation as a partisan right-wing media outlet and the fact that this came in the runup to an election, there was no reason to take their word for it at face value.
Houck also proclaimed, "As we found after the 2020 election, 9.4 percent of Biden voters in swing states wouldn’t have voted for him if they had been made aware of his son’s negligence." The MRC didn't "find" this -- it paid Trump's pollster to manufacture this result in order to push Donald Tump's Big Lie about a stolen election.
Houck did grudgingly admit that much of the laptop's contents couldn't be verified because of, as the Post stated, "sloppy handling of the data" by the right-wing activists who had been passing the laptop's contents around -- which puts the lie to Houck's headline claiming that the Post story was "confirming Hunter Biden's laptop." He then whined that the Post was "downplaying the 22,000 confirmed e-mails as 'routine messages, such as political newsletters, fundraising appeals, hotel receipts, news alerts, product ads, real estate listings and notifications related to his daughters’ schools or sports teams' and 'bank notifications'" and that it "shamelessly downplayed the lies and screeches about the laptop being Russian disinformation."
But Houck is forgetting that Rudy Giuliani and the New York Post -- which sprung this story as an October surprise during the 2020 election -- failed to provide proof at the time that the laptop's contents were verified as authentic, and as the Post pointed out elsewhere, skepticism about the laptop was absolutely warranted given its origins and the fact that Giuliani and the New York Post were vociferious Trump supporters. Speculation about the laptop being Russian disinformation was not a "lie" or "gaslighting,"as Houck insists, because the chain of custody was so tainted. Additionally, the owner of the computer store where Hunter allegedly brought the laptops to be repaired, John Paul Mac Isaac, couldn't give a straight answer to questions about them.Even today, the full chain of custody of the laptop and the data has never been made fully clear.
So, yes, skepticism about the laptop's provenance were absolutely justified at the time, and the fact that only some of those questions have been resolved a year and a half after the story was unleashed confirms that skepticism. It was only pro-Trump political partisan activists like Houck and the MRC who demanded that the laptop story be swallowed whole with no questions asked whatsoever.
At least the Washington Post bothered to try to authenticate what was claimed to be on the laptop. Neither Houck nor anyone else at the MRC ever did before obsessively touting it in an attempt to damage Joe Biden's election chances and, perhaps, drive Hunter Biden to suicidal behavior. They would have been pleased with either result -- or both.
