Topic: Media Research Center
We've noted how the Media Research Center has gotten mad that Hunter Biden is starting to fight back against the politics of personal destruction Republicans are using against him. Let's go back in time to look at another example of this anger that we initially overloooked. Curtis Houck ranted in a March 17 post:
Hunter Biden and his family’s team of high-powered attorneys amended their lawsuit Friday, against the former Delaware computer repair shop owner at the center of Hunter’s laptop scandal that exacerbated and illustrated for the world the First Son’s life of ruin.
Not surprisingly, the liberal media — ranging from ABCNews.com to Delaware’s top newspaper to The Washington Post — were so favorable in covering this filing against John Mac Isaac that they rhetorically camped themselves inside Hunter’s colon.
And seeing as how we’ve repeatedly shown that the major broadcast networks of ABC, CBS, and NBC have displayed barely any interest in the story on their flagship AM and PM shows, this provides a glimpse into how they’d report on it if they were forced to.
Houck complained yet again that non-right-wing media failed to obsess over the laptop the way right-wing activists demanded:
One of the more comical lines came when [ABC reporter Lucien] Bruggeman insisted Mac Issac “emerged as a central figure in the drama surrounding Hunter Biden's laptop in the waning days of the 2020 presidential campaign, when images, emails, and text messages allegedly belonging to Hunter Biden emerged in public and galvanized the national conversation as voters took to the polls."
Later in the piece, she further boasted: “This new legal offensive comes as congressional scrutiny of President Biden's family ramps up and federal prosecutors press forward in their yearslong probe of Hunter Biden's tax affairs and overseas business endeavors.”
Rating: Pants on Fire. Talk about an alternate reality where the corporate media were diligent (they weren’t), have remained to update on the latest findings (they haven’t been), took it seriously (they didn’t), and made it top of mind for voters (it wasn’t).
"Corporate media"? Isn't Fox News also a corporation?
Houck then attacked a Washington Post reporter as a "wannabe Biden adviser" (as if Houck is not a wannabe DeSantis adviser) and whined that the reporter "went to work poking holes in the basic paperwork Hunter signed when he dropped off his laptop, insisting the laptop was “the subject of intense scrutiny dating” back to the New York Post’s original, October 14, 2020 story, and offering a dubious conspiracy that the information may have been planted." Houck also went after another reporter:USA Today? More of the same. Bart Jansen leaned into Hunter’s spin with “‘Egregious violation’: Hunter Biden sues computer repairman who gave laptop data to Trump allies.”
Jansen explained in his lede, “Hunter Biden filed a claim Friday in federal court over a laptop filled with his personal information that was widely distributed, alleging that a computer repairman violated his privacy, took part in a conspiracy and helped others invade his privacy.”
Ignoring this bizarre line of thinking that the data was his but not necessarily the laptop, Jansen said “[t]he files included pictures of Hunter Biden using drugs, without clothes and in intimate relations with other adults.”
And where did they come from, Bart?
Houck even took the time to attack local media in Delaware:
Finally in local media, Delaware Online (the website for the Wilmington News Journal) said Hunter was “suing the Trolley Square computer repair shop owner who claimed Biden dropped off his computer and never retrieved it,” with Mac Isaac “rocket[ing] into the national spotlight in October 2020” and has since “portray[ed] himself as a victim in the scandal.”
If the First Family were hot on your trail and imploring the president’s Justice Department and the AG of the state the family unofficially rules over to join in, wouldn’t you think of yourself that way?
As if Mac Issac wasn't politially motivated here, given that his first instinct when given the laptop to repair was apparently to rummage through it for incriminating data and then hand it over to partisan pro-Trump operatives to use as political bait. Strangely, though, Houck offered no defense of Mac Issac at all in his post, telling us that his real source of anger here is that Hunter is fighting back.
Of course, right-wing activists like Houck don't think Hunter deserves a defense at all -- they think he should be an eternal punching bag simply for the sin of having Joe Biden for a father and for leading a less-than-perfect life, and they would not feel bad if they drove Hunter to suicide. He's not a human being to them -- he's an abstract object of hate, a narrative, a tool to exploit. And if President Biden loses or Hunter dies, all the better.
