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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The media elation over Donald Trump's latest indictment caused a massive amount of cable coverage on June 13 as he was arraigned. From 5 am to midnight, CNN and MSNBC devoted 95 percent of their non-commercial airtime to Trump.
But then when Trump made a speech in New Jersey to supporters, both CNN and MSNBC announced with pompous fanfare that they wouldn't air those remarks live, because Rachel Maddow said there's a cost if you "knowingly broadcast untrue things." Jake Tapper said they refused to air it "because frankly, he says a lot of things that are not true and sometimes potentially dangerous."
But who's president right now? Our director of media analysis Geoffrey Dickens counted 291 minutes of Trump indictment coverage on ABC, CBS, and NBC over four days. But as usual there were zero seconds of the latest allegations that Joe and Hunter Biden took bribes from corrupt Ukrainians at Burisma. One Burisma boss said he even had audio recordings with Hunter and Joe. Still, there was nothing.
Tony Bobulinski's assertions about the president being the person in "Ten percent for the Big Guy" remains largely untouched by the Big Three, while Fact Checkers at major papers throw buckets of skepticism at it.
In a livestream of Trump's speech to supporters on June 13, PBS included dismissive sentences on screen as a "fact check" of Trump. One message was "A House Republican panel's investigation into Hunter Biden has revealed little new information." PBS doesn't see its job as revealing new information on Biden.
Later, PBS put this text under Trump: "Experts warn that inflammatory rhetoric from elected officials or people in power can prompt individual actors to commit acts of violence." Even the liberal site Mediaite mocked the warning label, arguing "it's very difficult to imagine that the Venn diagram of Jan. 6 rioters and PBS viewers overlap at all."
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