New York Times 'Journalists' Were Worried ‘Lending Credence’ to Hunter Biden Laptop Would Cost Biden Election

OutKick recently published a column about how interference from the censorship industrial complex looms over the 2024 election, referring to a network of government agencies that House Judiciary filings show conspired to censor voters via social media for holding disfavored views ahead of the 2020 election. 

What's stopping the government and Big Tech from interfering in the 2024 election to, again, assist Joe Biden?  Nothing. Republicans frequently complain about social media interference but have done nothing to combat it.

And that puts Donald Trump, the presumptive GOP nominee, at a distinct disadvantage. The information on the internet is disproportionately slanted against Trump – from Google to Facebook to TikTok to Instagram.

X is important. But with just 51 million users, X is not exactly a counter to the whims of Mark Zuckerberg (Meta), the CCP (TikTok), and anonymous autocrats (Google and YouTube).

Then there is the legacy media, which has undertaken the same moral mission as the tech industry in trying to prevent Donald Trump from winning the election.

The New York Times tried to in 2020.

Former New York Times opinion editor Adam Rubenstein penned an article for The Atlantic in which he explained how Times' employees failed to fulfill their goal of being "journalistic, rather than activist." 

Specifically, Rubenstein referenced how Times' staffers did not want to report on the Hunter Biden laptop story – which was first reported by the New York Post –  out of fear it would hinder Biden's election efforts.

"Was it truly ‘unsubstantiated,’ as the paper kept saying?" Rubenstein asked, rhetorically. "At the time, it had been substantiated, however unusually, by Rudy Giuliani. 

"Many of my colleagues were clearly worried that lending credence to the laptop story could hurt the electoral prospects of Joe Biden and the Democrats. But starting from a place of party politics and assessing how a particular story could affect an election isn’t journalism."

Rather, the Times famously framed the laptop scandal as "Russian disinformation" in the weeks heading into the 2020 election. Not until 18 months later, in 2022, did the Times finally confirm the authenticity of the laptop exposé.

So the "paper of record" dismissed and belittled a soundly-reported scandal that could have swung the results of the presidential election. At least one in six Biden voters say they would have changed their vote had they been aware of the report's validity.

Rubenstein says Times employees were afraid to speak up or pen an op-ed questioning the dismissal of the story.

"Standard practice held that when a writer submitted an essay to an editor, the editor would share that draft with colleagues via an email distribution list," Rubenstein wrote.

"Then we would all discuss it. But many of my colleagues didn’t want their name attached to op-eds advancing conservative arguments, and early-to-mid-career staffers would routinely oppose their publication."

Call it interference, censorship, or corruption – corporate and social media have a legal pathway to manipulate the distribution of honest information in order to elevate the chances of their preferred candidate.

They did it in 2020. They will do it in 2024.

Biden trails Trump in both the polls and betting odds. He could use a boost from his allies in media and tech. We expect he's about to receive a few.