Shoe Leather Nowhere in Sight at New York Times
Hunter Story Aims for the Messenger, Ignores the Message
I am as skeptical as the next guy about ostensibly incriminating, last-minute presidential campaign stories, whether Donald Trump or Joe Biden is being the one indicted. But skepticism doesn’t alleviate the responsibility of a newspaper like the New York Times to do a respectable job vetting a story like the New York Post’s maybe-revelation, maybe disinformation story, about Hunter Biden’s hard drive. The Post story, coming a couple weeks before the 2020 election, presented the possibility that Hunter’s computer hard drive, somehow retrieved by Trump supporter Rudy Giuliani, contained incriminating evidence about actions then-vice president Joe Biden took toward the Ukraine which somehow aided his son Hunter, who was on the board of the Ukrainian company Burisma.
I have no idea, nor does anyone else at this point, whether the hard drive was actually Hunter’s and, if it was, whether the e-mails Giuliani flagged were themselves real and, if they were, whether they prove Biden did anything wrong. That is not my point here.
My point is that the Times story showed an abysmal lack of effort, and that is true both for its digging, or in this case, lack thereof, on the hard drive and the e-mails and Giuliani’s role in the affair.
The Times story on October 19 related that some Times’ staffers pulled their bylines from the story for reasons having to do with the hard drive’s legitimacy and then the story went on to criticize the reporter and editor whose names were finally attached to the story for their supposed conservative leanings. That was suppose to cast doubt on the legitimacy of the story, a point made in the aftermath of the Times’ story by many former Democratic intelligence officials and members of Congress, such as Rep. Adam Schiff, none of whom had any hold of the facts of the case.
Here is the headline on the Times’ story:
New York Post Published Hunter Biden Report Amid Newsroom Doubts
The Times story raises plenty of doubts about its own newsroom, from which, based on this story, inquisitiveness and serious, tough reporting have disappeared. Here speculation masquerades as a serious news article. An obvious effort to shoot down the “Biden and Hunter” story, the Times showed an alarming failure to pose tough interview questions to those involved, leaving one with the feeling that the Times was doing all it could to protect Joe Biden.
Here is the most glaringly “soft” paragraph in the story:
“The article also suggested that the elder Mr. Biden had met with a Burisma adviser, Vadym Pozharskyi. On Wednesday, a Biden campaign spokesman said that Mr. Biden’s official schedules showed no meeting between the former vice president and the adviser. Last month, two Republican-led Senate committees investigating the matter said they had found no evidence of wrongdoing by the former vice president.”
The Times should have asked Biden personally, or his campaign spokesperson, whether Biden met at any time with Pozharskyi. Letting Biden get away with saying “no official meetings” were on his schedule is reportorial dereliction of duty. And where is Hunter? Why wasn’t he asked whether the computer in question is his, and whether the e-mails Giuliani flagged are legitimate? There was no effort to contact Hunter.
With regard to the “Republican-led Senate committee,” first, did it have the hard drive when it wrote its report? Did its report finding of “no wrongdoing” include any language saying that if Biden broke no laws he might have crossed some ethical lines? Or was that report a full vindication?
Neither was Giuliani interviewed. How did he get the hard drive from what was posed as a computer repair shop in Delaware? For that matter, how about an interview with the owner of that shop? Did Hunter Biden come in and drop off the computer containing the hard drive? That is an obvious question whose answer would have wiped away a lot of the useless speculation about Russian disinformation. There is apparently a work order for the computer repair Hunter signed and the Delaware shop had in its possession. Did the Times ask for that? Apparently not.
The Times’ story reports: “Many Post staff members questioned whether the paper had done enough to verify the authenticity of the hard drive’s contents…”
That is rich criticism coming from the Times. Rather than undermine the Post’s story because of the allegedly conservative mindset of its reporters the Times could have “one-upped” the Post, and shown its mettle, by writing a tight, factual story with indisputable facts disproving the Post story unquestionably (or vindicating it god forbid). The Times didn’t do that. It took the lazy route.
That says much about the Times, which bills itself as “the paper of record,” and really about ostensibly authoritative journalism today where facts are in short supply and partisan opinion stands in the way of good, shoe leather news reporting.
