Uri Berliner, a senior business editor at NPR, admitted in a stunning op-ed published Tuesday that despite his outlet turning a “blind eye” to the Hunter Biden laptop story, the laptop was indeed newsworthy and that it revealed a “connection to the corrupt world of influence peddling.”
Berliner also admitted that when it became known that the laptop was indeed real — and not Russian disinformation as 51 former intelligence officials had claimed, NPR did not fess up to its “misjudgment.”
Berliner wrote in his piece, published in the Free Press:
In October 2020, the New York Post published the explosive report about the laptop Hunter Biden abandoned at a Delaware computer shop containing emails about his sordid business dealings. With the election only weeks away, NPR turned a blind eye. Here’s how NPR’s managing editor for news at the time explained the thinking: ‘We don’t want to waste our time on stories that are not really stories, and we don’t want to waste the listeners’ and readers’ time on stories that are just pure distractions.’
But it wasn’t a pure distraction, or a product of Russian disinformation, as dozens of former and current intelligence officials suggested. The laptop did belong to Hunter Biden. Its contents revealed his connection to the corrupt world of multimillion-dollar influence peddling and its possible implications for his father.
The laptop was newsworthy. But the timeless journalistic instinct of following a hot story lead was being squelched. During a meeting with colleagues, I listened as one of NPR’s best and most fair-minded journalists said it was good we weren’t following the laptop story because it could help Trump.
Berliner also slammed his own outlet, saying that when the reporting and laptop were confirmed as real, NPR did not admit it.
“When the essential facts of the Post’s reporting were confirmed and the emails verified independently about a year and a half later, we could have fessed up to our misjudgment. But, like Russia collusion, we didn’t make the hard choice of transparency,” he concluded.
In his piece, he lamented NPR’s leftward slant over time, and the rise of advocacy there after former President Donald Trump was elected in 2016.
He also slammed the outlet’s coverage of the Russia collusion hoax, and hitching its wagon to Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA), who was the lead oromoter of the hoax in Congress. He is now running for the U.S. Senate in California.
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