Mainstream media has shown little interest in several of the New York Post’s bombshell Hunter Biden reports since they first came out on the morning of Oct. 14.
The reports, based on data from an alleged laptop hard drive that belongs to Hunter Biden, suggest that Hunter Biden used his father’s influence, then-Vice President Joe Biden, to make lucrative deals with big companies from Ukraine and China.
CNN and ABC completely ignored the report on those two days, while CBS and MSNBC both contributed about 4 and half minutes to the Hunter Biden scandal, the analysis claimed.
Even when the media mentioned it, “they devoted much of their time to knocking it down,” said Geoffrey Dickens, the Deputy Research Director at Media Research Center.
Hours after the initial New York Post report was published, social media giants Facebook and Twitter took unprecedented steps to block or limit access to the story.
Facebook and Twitter faced strong backlash over their actions.
The first response of the New York Times and USA Today focused more on the unusual actions taken by Facebook and Twitter than on the breaking scandal itself. “Facebook and Twitter found the story dubious enough to limit access to it on their platform,” stated a New York Times article on Oct. 14.
An article from USA Today on Oct. 16 titled “FBI probing whether emails in New York Post story about Hunter Biden are tied to Russian disinformation,” echoed a CNN report from earlier that afternoon.
The New York Times then published another article on Oct. 18, indicating that New York Post reporters had doubts about the authenticity of the hard drive’s contents.