The Washington Post admitted recently the media’s reaction to the Hunter Biden laptop story in 2020 “is an opportunity for a reckoning.” But reporter Anne Applebaum apparently disagrees.
Applebaum, a writer for left-leaning magazine the Atlantic, was confronted with a substantive question about the media’s reaction to the story at a “disinformation” conference on Wednesday. Instead of engaging in honest self-reflection on behalf of her peers, Applebaum dismissed the story’s importance.
What happened?
During a Q&A panel at the University of Chicago event, a student asked Applebaum, citing a Media Research Center poll, whether the mainstream media acted “inappropriately” for suppressing and dismissing the Hunter Biden story.
“Do you think the media acted inappropriately when they instantly dismissed Hunter Biden’s laptop as Russian disinformation, and what can be learned from that in ensuring that what we label as disinformation is truly disinformation and not reality?” the student asked.
“My problem with Hunter Biden’s laptop is, I think, totally irrelevant,” Applebaum said.
“I mean, it’s not whether it’s disinformation — I mean, I don’t think Hunter Biden’s business relationships have anything to do with who should be president of the United States,” she continued. “I don’t find it to be interesting, I mean, that would be my problem with that as a major news story.”
When Applebaum concluded, moderator David Axelrod ended the panel.
WATCH The Atlantic’s @anneapplebaum refuse to answer @RealDSchmidt‘s🔥🔥 question about Hunter Biden’s laptop during @UChicago’s “Disinformation and the Erosion of Democracy” conference! pic.twitter.com/1OgXBBiiI0
— The Chicago Thinker (@ThinkerChicago) April 6, 2022
Applebaum wrote about the Biden-related controversies in the weeks prior to the 2020 presidential election, calling them “right-wing-media smears”
Meanwhile, despite admitting that she is not interested in the Hunter Biden story, Applebaum repeatedly raised concerns of conflict of interest over the proximity of Donald Trump’s children to him when he was president (such as Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner serving as senior advisers) and the possibility that the Trump family profited from the White House.
Thus, Applebaum’s reaction to the question was described as “arrogant” because it “perfectly encapsulates why so many distrust the media.”
Anything else?
The Hunter Biden laptop story is anything but irrelevant.
Despite media outlets and social media companies suppressing the story in October 2020, the New York Times and Washington Post — the nation’s biggest newspapers — recently confirmed what was already known: The laptop and emails are real, and they belonged to Hunter Biden.
In a honest editorial published on Sunday, the Post thus admitted the lesson that should be learned from 2020 is that there is “a danger of suppressing accurate and relevant stories.”
Authored by Chris Enloe via TheBlaze.com
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