The Hijacking of Democracy

Major Media, Big Tech and Alternative Media Buried The Hunter Biden Story

Glen Greenwald’s System Update as he details the media coverup of the Biden story.

Everyone needs to sit down and watch Glen Greenwald’s coverage of the orchestration by major media, Big Tech and much independent media that covered (or hosted) the Hunter Biden laptop story last year. From left-of-centre media in October, we were slammed with swift denouncements of the New York Post story despite the plethora of evidence presented. The Hunter Biden emails had already been authenticated last year. Despite the facts having been laid out: major media was spinning the lies in one room, pretending that a real news story published by the competition was inconvenient to their ideological aims, so they fire-bombed the professional integrity of journalism.

A slew of media outlets and journalists took a truthful news story and invented an “email verification mystery” that they artificially hitched to the Post story while failing to launch any investigation into the emails (that we know of). In framing the Post story as “fake” and fraudulent, neoliberal media out-faked themselves collectively running hundreds of actual fake stories stating, in some cases, that the laptop story was disinformation. Then when the going got rough, liberal media merely dusted off the handy Russiagate plot and suddenly we saw a bizarre journalistic concern for the source of these emails rather than their veracity. Fake news met Disneyland and audiences were hooked.

Along with major media running disinformation on the Biden laptop, “alternative” news sites ran the same fake news stories with zero attempt to ascertain the veracity of the Biden emails much less conduct any investigation of the Post story. Just like major media, alterative media also behaved as the press office to the Democratic Party effectively protecting a presidential candidate from scrutiny and criticism. By turning the story’s truth on its head, calling it out as fake, implying that the Post was either complicit in fraud or duped by Russia, the camps were divided. And the divisions cracked on familiar partisan lines in step with their major media cohorts as the terrain was set for Big Tech to take over as the traffickers of this fake news. 

Big Tech, already seated behind the wizard’s curtain, more furiously than ever pulling and pushing on the levers in the hours following the Post story, was ready to make the Great and Powerful Oz appear. Social media changed the rules on who was allowed to speak and on what subjects the public could speak. Big Tech shut down the ability to share—or in some cases reference—this factual story anywhere on the platforms under its influence and the Post’s own Twitter account was blocked for two weeks. Then there’s the takedown of Parler by Amazon, Apple and Google. Even if you disagree with the political focus of the Parler or the Post, it should worry everyone that Silicon Valley has teamed up with media to shut down a news story.

This was a concerted, organised undertaking to control both the content of and access to media. Make no mistake, this is a scandal that dwarfs any other in recent decades. When media outlets cultivate friendships in the next room with those who hold the power and technology to sanitise and remove the presence of inconvenient—even if factual—news, rebranding it as “fake news,” we must question everything about the news we are provided and mechanisms that allow or block our ability to discuss this news. The fact that alternative left-of-centre “progressive” media joined in the slating the Post’s Biden story as “disinformation" is even more cause for unease.

There was a massive disinformation campaign launched by media across the west to cover up a story they they did not bother investigating. To date, we currently have no investigation into what happened within major media centres—serious, policy-changing investigations—that would have resounding consequences for the future of news reporting. Aside from the federal probe into Hunter Biden’s “tax affairs," no major media outlets are even being asked to question where they got it wrong. When one of the more trustworthy alternative media, The Intercept, an outlet Greenwald helped to create, attempted to censor him on this topic, a pattern of complicity between media and partisan interests became visible running counter to every journalistic principle.

In his video, Greenwald uncovers how “disinformation” paved the way to rewriting this particular history and he demonstrates how publications from around the political neoliberal left got on board to spread lies about the Hunter Biden emails. In effect, from the HuffPost to PBS to the Washington Post to The Intercept and almost every major media outlet from the centre to the left where CIA lies were spread about the media as the truth, “We must treat the Hunter Biden leaks as if they were a foreign intelligence operation—even if they probably aren't.” Wilful propaganda was exploited by major and independent media and spread about just weeks before the US presidential election that, should this story have been properly covered, would have undoubtedly caused Donald Trump to have won last year’s election given the plethora of verified information that indicts Hunter Biden and Joe Biden in some troubling business and political dealing with Burisma Holdings, a Ukrainian energy company.

I won’t go into all the details of Greenwald’s coverage as he more than aptly handles the dissemination of the facts. That Big Tech, independent leftist media and major media buried this story through a symphony of lies, each section of the orchestra carefully playing its part, is what should deeply worry us all. From Facebook’s Andy Stone who claimed that Facebook needs to “fact check” the documents on Biden’s computer to approve the sharing of the Biden story and that there has not been any fact check undertaken by any of these media giants also unveils a Big Tech theatre which pretends to have the duty of a politburo to verify news even pulling fact-checked stories on Covid-19 because it goes against their particular news requisites. Who decides what is newsworthy then? Between major or minor media churning out fictional coverage about the Biden emails and Big Tech controlling the sharing of this factual news story, we are left adrift in the fake news that leftist media handed us last autumn. 

There are many more questions that we must ask ourselves and hold up to the media (and to the Bidens) for answers. Just a quick look over Biden’s inner circle from his entry into office and we see a troubling collection of major players from Big Tech, major media and the military industry. Last year, journalist Matt Taibbi published an article documenting Biden's attempt to replace a Ukranian prosecutor in 2015 which directly benefited Burisma. The media has been silent.

Even putting the questions of Biden’s emails and involvement to Burisima to the side, why did every major media and many independent media misreport this story, parroting Biden’s own claim of “Russian disinformation” to protect the then-presidential candidate, Joe Biden? Also implicated in this mess is the Democratic Party which has, in the words of Scott Jennings, “treated Russia like a political punchline instead of a real adversary. An entire party put on a virtual reality helmet and completely committed to an alternate universe, even as it repeatedly stumbled into the living room furniture.” What is the role of media today where outlets like the Intercept are carrying water for the Democratic Party as Big Tech and neoliberal media are advancing their vested interests in helping usher forth a Biden presidency by covering up any story that would contribute to a loss of votes for Biden?

We have seen this whitewashing of history and science time and time over—more exaggeratedly in recent years and within various political spheres (eg. the medicalisation of feelings, the surveillance of politics by employers). The one reason why the gender industry has been at the crosshairs of a full-fledged culture war has as much to do with the rights of women and girls as it does the irrationality of media discourse that props up anti-science hokum over and over with little to no coverage of the other side of this debate. Just as Slate and MSNBC have been creating a fictional backstory about the critics gender identity ideology, fashioning the masses of leftist women organising and speaking out in the UK as part of an alleged right-wing cabal pushing against the rights of people who identify as “transgender," the reality is that much of the media has been making up vast tracts of what we call “the news.” The pushback against gender ideology is coming from across the political spectrum and the masses of organised women’s groups are vastly membered by women staunchly on the political left. Yet, open up any debate on this subject and Slate, Vice, The New York Times and many others happily misreport leftist feminists as the Christian right.

So when Greenwald calls the media that covered up the Biden story “DNC propaganda arms,” he is not wrong. In the desperate attempt to ensure a Trump loss, journalism lost its mandate entirely. I covered these events last year here where I wrote the following:

While this news is, in fact, newsworthy, it’s simply not the hopeful mic drop that many on the right have hoped it would be. There is nothing cataclysmic about this story that we have not seen before where favouritism from powerful families affords relatives paid positions that hardly match their qualifications. What is devastating, however, is the fact that Facebook and Twitter have systematically censured the New York Post’s articles on this subject. And for this, we should be all very worried about how Big Tech is not only manipulating the news and its dissemination but how it is now curating the news.

With last year’s media circus by centrist and left-leaning media about how Trump was planning to “steal the election” through voter fraud, the irony is that major and independent media along with Big Tech altered the outcome of last year’s presidential election through the control and media-generated slamming of honest journalism even if that publication is not left-of-centre. 

Last year I wrote that the all-too-comfortable bedfellows of Big Tech and major media acting as party public relations officers does little to advance the transparency of political processes:

Access to the public square is in peril of being erased simply because it depends almost entirely upon the individual’s or media's will to conform to a specific political narrative. While we might all agree that there are benefits to social media, we can no longer excuse or minimise the fact that these corporations which have more power than any government on the planet today are having an undemocratic and authoritarian control over free speech and the political process.

We must demand that the media be responsible to investigate all sides of the stories which they report, to get other views on situations and to fact-check repeatedly if necessary. What happened with the failing coverage of the Hunter Biden stories leaves our democracy in peril if the media insists on embedding itself within politics. The Guardian learned this lesson over the past year with the departure of Suzanne Moore who left the Guardian after being effectively bullied out of her job for holding a view of biology and women’s rights that run counter to the prevailing work culture of that paper. As she tells me, “It was untenable in terms of integrity if I could not say what I wanted. I think the letter and refusal of editors to defend me in public was bullying in a way.”

Politico ran this story last October: “Hunter Biden story is Russian disinfo, dozens of former intel officials say.” In the story, Politico writes: “But the release of the material, which POLITICO has not independently verified, has drawn comparisons to 2016 when Russian hackers dumped troves of emails from Democrats onto the internet — producing few damaging revelations but fueling accusations of corruption by Trump.” So this is Politico making conjecture and not fact-checking. 

And then this week Politico runs this story, “Double trouble for Biden,” wherein the journalists effectively counter last year’s story while still not having undertaken any fact-checking or verification of the files:

Ben Schreckinger’s “The Bidens: Inside the First Family’s Fifty-Year Rise to Power,” out today, finds evidence that some of the purported HUNTER BIDEN laptop material is genuine, including two emails at the centre of last October’s controversy.

A person who had independent access to Hunter Biden’s emails confirmed he did receive a 2015 email from a Ukrainian businessman thanking him for the chance to meet Joe Biden. The same goes for a 2017 email in which a proposed equity breakdown of a venture with Chinese energy executives includes the line, “10 held by H for the big guy?” (This person recalled seeing both emails, but was not in a position to compare the leaked emails word-for-word to the originals.)

MORE: Emails released by a Swedish government agency also match emails in the leaked cache, and two people who corresponded with Hunter Biden confirmed emails from the cache were genuine.

While the leak contains genuine files, it remains possible that fake material has been slipped in.

It’s a complete flip: Politico had previously decided the story was akin to Russiagate (also entirely and officially debunked earlier this week) and now gives details as to the contents of the emails while still pretending that these files have not been verified. The fact is that the files have long ago been authenticated, a fact that now some media is reiterating. Politico is doing the cha-cha-cha with the news it would seem.

Where are our politicians demanding an inquiry into what was a hijacking of public interest information by private and public media outlets together with the CIA? Why is Big Tech allowed to censor the sharing of news stories? Why have independent media outlets failed us so miserably in covering this issue to include a follow-up investigation into how such a media coverup may have contributed to the Biden presidency given that three weeks before the election, this story was ripe for investigation? We have known for decades that media coverage and access to media directly affects voting decisions. Accurate information is all we can hope to possess to carry through our democratic participation in selecting a future president. The access to clear and honest information regarding the Bidens' political and financial dealings with Burisma was removed by the media which set out to wilfully misreport these events with Big Tech playing its role in blocking the sharing of the more accurate media coverage on this subject.

We must demand accountability from our government, media outlets that buried and misreported the story, and the Big Tech corporations that orchestrated a communications coup of both public information and public trust. We deserve answers and journalism that does not attempt to sway voters because as it would appear, Trump Derangement Syndrome has reached the very foundation of journalistic ethics. 

We may never know the full damage that this concerted media coverup has done to American democracy and electoral politics, but one thing is certain: The Republicans and many others on the right (and some of us on the left) are quite angry about what has been allowed to take place. There are even those who believe this was an orchestrated media putsch. Given the damning evidence that many of us working on the Biden laptop since last October have presented over the past eleven months, who can blame anyone for thinking that this was a scheme masterminded by politicians, media corporations and Big Tech which together seem to have manipulated election outcomes by burying a story in disinformation that would have otherwise negatively affected the candidate they wanted to win?