EDITOR’S NOTE, February 16, 2024: On February 15, Justice Department Counsel David Weiss indicted FBI informant Alexander Smirnov on two felony counts of making a false statement and creating a false and fictitious record for claims made to the bureau. The charges are in relation to June 2020 FD-1023 form alleging President Joe Biden and son Hunter Biden received a combined $10 million in a bribery scheme involving the Ukrainian energy company, Burisma.
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Back there in the ancient age of November, 1986, my younger self, then a Reagan White House Associate Political Director, was in the Oval Office with Political Office colleagues and President Reagan.
The reason was a presidential “thank you” for our work on the 1986 congressional elections, in which we had sent the President around the country to campaign for various Republican candidates. The Oval Office was calm and quiet as we talked and posed for the inevitable photos.
But outside the Oval? Just down the hall in the White House press room all hell was breaking loose. Word had just appeared in a Lebanese magazine that there had been a secret “arms for hostages” agreement between the United States and Iran. It was revealed the US had been secretly trading arms to Iran in return for the release of American hostages. With money from the sales to Iran being funneled to the anti-Communist Nicaraguan “Contras.”
When our photo op was over, the President walked down the hall with Attorney General Edwin Meese to the press room. He stepped to the podium to announce he had asked Meese to brief the press on the issue. It was bedlam. Yells, demands, chaos from the White House press corps.
It was only the beginning. Day after day after day for months the media was on this story with a frenzied zeal. There was a demand for a Special Counsel, congressional hearings and a commission to investigate. After all of those demands were met and various Reagan officials were investigated, indicted and convicted, the “Iran-Contra Affair” as it came to be called faded away.
Now.
Contrast that media coverage with the media’s non-coverage of the Biden family scandals. Where is the New York Times coverage? Not there. The Washington Post? There but buried. Where is the liberal media obsession with getting to the bottom of all this?
Not there.
It takes NewsMax’s White House correspondent James Rosen (and full disclosure I am a NewsMax contributor) to ask Biden spokesman John Kirby about the now infamous “WhatsApp” message from Hunter Biden to China’s Harvest Fund Management director Henry Zhao. The message read:
Tell the director that I would like to resolve this now before it gets out of hand, and now means tonight,” the now-53-year-old said. “And, Z, if I get a call or text from anyone involved in this other than you, Zhang, or the chairman, I will make certain that between the man sitting next to me and every person he knows and my ability to forever hold a grudge that you will regret not following my direction.
Kirby declined to answer, as did White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre.
But suffice to say, James Rosen’s hard hitting coverage is almost a stand alone in terms of the larger media.
My NewsBusters colleague Geoffrey Dickens has taken a look at the coverage now of the Trump indictment versus the coverage of the Biden scandals. He headlines this:
Nets Spend 491 Minutes On Trump Indictment, 0 Seconds On Biden Burisma Bribery
Geoffrey reports:
There’s also been a ‘two-tiered system’ of network coverage.
Back on June 8, two massive political stories broke, but ONLY one of them got covered by the broadcast networks. On June 8, former President Donald Trump was indicted by the Special Counsel in the classified documents case. That very same day, it was reported that President Joe Biden had allegedly received $5 million dollars from an executive of the Ukrainian gas company Burisma, the same company in which his son Hunter was involved.
Over 12 days (June 8-June 21) the Big Three (ABC, CBS, NBC) broadcast networks crammed their evening, morning and Sunday roundtable shows with a total of 491 minutes of coverage dedicated to the Trump indictment.
But how much did the Biden/Burisma alleged bribery scheme receive?
Zero seconds.
…The prediction here is — if they follow their familiar and recent patterns — the networks will continue to aggressively track the Trump case, drop the Hunter charges like a hot potato, and resume their censorship of the Biden family scandals.
Which is to say, whether it was the explosive news of the Iran-Contra affair 37 years ago, or the coverage of the Trump indictment today, the media then and now will devote endless hours of obsessive coverage to a Republican president and whatever misstep he is seen to have made.
But when it comes to a Democrat, in this case the shocking evidence from an investigating congressional committee that Hunter Biden, with his father literally at his side, was personally profiting from a bribery scheme using his father’s office and connections? Or that there had been a $5 million bribe to Biden from Ukraine’s Burisma? Well, we’re all essentially told by the media to just move along. Nothing to see here.
Thankfully there is the Washington Free Beacon’s Chuck Ross and Andrew Kerr doing real journalism, headlining:
Hunter Biden was at Joe’s Delaware home the same day he used his dad as leverage in China biz text, laptop photos reveal
Ross and Kerr report:
Photographs on Hunter Biden's abandoned laptop place him at his father's Wilmington, Delaware, residence on the day he invoked President Joe Biden's name in a text message, threatening his Chinese business partner to come down on him with their full weight if the business partner did not fulfill his ‘commitment.’
Yet this coverage by Rosen, Ross and Kerr are the lonely journalistic voices crying in the wilderness. It doesn’t come close to the constant, daily obsession the media had with Ronald Reagan’s Iran-Contra affair or now with Donald Trump’s targeting by the Department of Justice.
All of which is to say, in the almost 40 years since Iran-Contra, nothing has changed with the liberal media. If, as said, the scandal story is about a Republican president or former president, the dog whistle goes off and its all hands on deck. If in fact it’s a Democrat in the White House, the media just looks the other way.
In other words?
The more things change the more they stay the same. Biden scandals? What Biden scandals?
Shocking.
Not.
