The New York Times made the arrest of a freshman Republican congressman its lead story Thursday morning. The sage of Republican Rep. George Santos is an admittedly colorful one, but perhaps it was overboard treatment by the Times to play it as the top story of the day, under the headline: “SANTOS IS INDICTED AS INQUIRY CLAIMS 3 FINANCE SCHEMES -- Charges Include Fraud, Theft and Lying -- Lawmaker Pleads Not Guilty.”
The constrast is especially stark, considering the reluctant coverage the paper has given over the years to convicted House Democratic congresspeople from accusation to conviction to imprisonment, to the point of “forgetting” to even identify the convicted representative as a Democrat.
Grace Ashford and Michael Gold reported on Santos:
Federal prosecutors charged [Santos] with 13 counts of wire fraud, money laundering, stealing public funds and lying on federal disclosure forms, and took him into custody.
The same front page featured this blurb to a story on page A18 that had the political scandal roles reversed and the treatment was quite drastically different:
“G.O.P. Lacks Proof on Bidens --After months of investigation and many public accusations of corruption against President Biden and his family, an inquiry by the House G.O.P. has yet to find evidence of misconduct.
The Times’ negative aggression toward Republican oversight of a Democratic president is amazing, especially after years of the paper’s giddy coverage of Trump scandals, with Democrats like Rep. Jamie Raskin and Rep. Eric Swalwell were hailed as heroes in its pages, even if they're not truthful themselves.
As The Federalist’s Jordan Boyd pointed out, the headlines are also factually inaccurate. The GOP may not yet have proof of Biden family misconduct, but they’ve laid out plenty of “evidence.”
Luke Broadwater reported the apparent nothingburger of a story under the don’t-even-bother headline “House Republican Report Finds No Evidence of Wrongdoing by President Biden.”
After four months of investigation, House Republicans who promised to use their new majority to unearth evidence of wrongdoing by President Biden acknowledged on Wednesday that they had yet to uncover incriminating material about him, despite their frequent insinuations that he and his family have been involved in criminal conduct and corruption.
At a much-publicized news conference on Capitol Hill to show the preliminary findings of their premier investigation into Mr. Biden and his family, leading Republicans released financial documents detailing how some of the president’s relatives were paid more than $10 million from foreign sources between 2015 and 2017.
….
But on Wednesday, the Republicans conceded that they had yet to find evidence of a specific corrupt action Mr. Biden took in office in connection with any of the business deals his son entered into. Instead, their presentation underscored how little headway top G.O.P. lawmakers have made in finding clear evidence of questionable transactions they can tie to Mr. Biden, their chief political rival.
After that almost perversely biased headline, Broadwater dutifully laid out some of Rep. Comer’s findings, including Hunter Biden’s lucrative entanglements with Chinese and Romanian companies and admitted a few faults by President Biden.
But Mr. Biden has made several false or misleading statements about the matter.
During the 2020 presidential debate, Mr. Biden claimed that no one in his family had received money from China.
“My son has not made money in terms of this thing about — what are you talking about, China,” Mr. Biden said, turning the charge on his opponent, President Donald J. Trump. “The only guy who made money from China is this guy. He’s the only one. Nobody else has made money from China.
Broadwater did squeeze in news involving Hunter Biden’s incriminating laptop computer under this refreshingly direct subhead:
Officials allied with Mr. Biden played a role in wrongly discrediting Hunter Biden’s laptop.
