The MRC's Hunter Biden Derangement: The Trial
As Hunter Biden went on trial on gun-related charges, the Media Research Center complained that the non-right-wing media doesn't hate him like it does -- and, of course, obsessed over the laptop.
The Media Research Center spent much of the winter being bummed that it had to walk back a major part of its anti-Hunter Biden jihad when it turned out the main witness to his purported business shenanigans was a liar (though it still hasn’t disclosed to its readers that it was forced to alter dozens of posts to reflect that information). But there was more, relatively minor legal activity on the horizon, so the MRC tried to get geared up for that. A May 9 post by Jorge Bonilla whined that most non-right-wing media failed to report on a relatively minor procedural motion by Biden’s attorneys to dismiss the gun charges against him. Bonilla did concede that the appeal involved a “Bruen defense against the gun charges, which puts many Second Amendment advocates in the unusual position of being sympathetic to the younger Biden” — not that he expressed any of that sympathy, of course.
Bonilla returned for a May 19 post trying to split hairs once more about whether the Hunter laptop story was “censored” in 2020: “In fact, the Hunter Biden laptop story was blacked out by the media.” Apparently, Bonilla doesn’t consider Fox News, the New York Post or any other right-wing media outlet that obsessed over the laptop to be part of “the media.” He then cited the MRC’s so-called study that “confirms as much- textbook election interference by the media in conjunction with Big Tech.” In fact, that bogus “study” was based on a pair of dubious polls the MRC bought from right-wing polling firms, including Trump’s own election pollster.
As Hunter’s trial drew nearer, Curtis Houck was excited for it in a June 3 post — but angry that non-right-wing outlets treated Hunter as a human being instead of the partisan punching bag he and his fellow right-wingers demand (and that this right-wing narrative was called out):
Surprisingly, the major broadcast networks of ABC, CBS, and NBC had full reports on their flagship morning news shows about the start of the first Hunter Biden trial to the tune of eight minutes and 43 seconds, but was well short of the 14 minutes and three seconds on April 15 to kick off the Trump trial.
And, while they were giddy at Trump’s starting, they were crestfallen over the “sad and sordid” trial getting underway that’s already taken “a real personal toll” on President Biden as a lead GOP “political punching bag”.
ABC’s Good Morning America was the most excited at the Trump trial (as well as the guilty verdict of the former President), so it came as no surprise they downplayed the trial, acting like Hunter’s a child and Joe a powerless father.
Senior national correspondent Terry Moran was beside himself: “This is a historic case, but it is also a sad and sordid tale of drug addiction and its consequences in the Biden family, as in so many American families. And it carries the very real potential of personal and political pain for the President.”
Leaning into the attempts at sympathy, Moran emphasized Hunter is “President Joe Biden’s only living son” and “spoken publicly about his struggles with addiction.”
[…]
After noting the witness list includes his ex-girlfriend/late brother Beau’s widow, Hallie Biden, [NBC correspondent Ryan] Nobles trumpeted President Biden’s coziness with his son and time at the White House as endearing, which certainly wouldn’t be the case if one of President Trump’s adult sons or daughters were tried during his first term.
Another post that day by Tim Graham whined that NBC’s “Meet the Press” asked House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries only one question about Hunter and didn’t go all Fox News on him: “‘Fact-based’ reporters don’t point out that Hunter Biden has done many things wrong, starting with the crack cocaine and hookers.” This from the guy who still hasn’t told MRC readers about the dozens of posts that were altered to reflect the discredited witness.
Bonilla returned for a June 4 post whining that non-right-wing media weren’t trying to personally destroy Hunter the way right-wing outlets like the MRC are:
The networks must have collective whiplash. The brutality and edge of their coverage of former President Donald Trump’s Manhattan business records trial is eclipsed by the collective tenderness with which they’re handling Hunter Biden’s federal trial on gun charges in Wilmington, Delaware.
[…]
The rest of the coverage was essentially a love letter to a father’s undying love for his troubled son. Or “child”, as the networks ridiculously characterized 54-year-old Hunter Biden- a deference never accorded to the Bush twins when they were busted for underaged drinking.
Bonilla went on to hope for the laptop to be introduced as evidence: “If Special Counsel David Weiss is intending to enter the laptop as evidence, he’ll need to elicit testimony authenticating the laptop, which per the (also media-suppressed) IRS whistleblowers happened in November of 2019.” Bonilla offered no reason why laptop should be referenced in court.
While the MRC labored hard to portray Donald Trump as an innocent victim during his New York trial (which was negated by the fact that he was found guilty on all 34 counts he faced), it lashed out at anyone who dared to treat Hunter Biden like a human being instead of the right-wing punching bag it has treated him as for years. That contempt continued as the trial got under way. Curtis Houck whined in a June 4 post:
Following nauseatingly soft and sympathetic-seeking coverage on Monday morning and evening about the first Hunter Biden trial, Tuesday morning brought about even more of the same about the “emotional” First Son “getting support from the First Family” who’ve “rush[ed] to his defense”. The coverage disparity grew even more stark with a total of 23 minutes and 30 seconds through three news cycles vs. 49 minutes and 47 seconds at this point in the Trump trial.
ABC’s Good Morning America again led the way with senior national correspondent Terry Moran boasting “[p]rosecutors say this is a simple case and it’s moving quickly.”
[…]
Moran made sure to try to have viewers feel bad for Hunter: “Also in the courtroom, First Lady Jill Biden, Hunter’s sister Ashley, and his wife Alyssa. Hunter Biden at times growing emotional seeing his family at his side. He said in the past that they saved his life.”
Like the good party mouthpiece that he is, Moran concluded with a rehashing of President Biden’s Monday statement in support of Hunter.
Funny, we don’t recall Houck and his fellow MRCers admitting they were party mouthpieces with their soft coverage of Trump during his trial.
Nicholas Fondacaro worked his Hunter-hatred into his daily hate-watch of “The View”:
Hunter Biden was finally brought to trial this week to answer for his alleged crime of lying on a federal background check form when purchasing a firearm, a felony. But ABC’s Alyssa Farah Griffin, one of The View’s faux-conservatives, finally found a trial she didn’t like. After previously cheering on the ethically dubious trial of former President Trump, on Tuesday’s show she was decrying the trials as a distraction from the real issues.
For months prior to Tuesday, Farah Griffin had touted the trial against Trump because polling data suggested that a non-insignificant portion of Republican voters would ditch him if he was convicted. But now that a conviction had been scored, she was finished with all the trial coverage now that Biden was under the microscope.
“I’m not particularly interested in this case but I think I am frustrated this election cycle the media coverage feels like it’s trial this, conviction this, this trial, him walking into the courtroom,” she huffed.
Bonilla served up a second daily trial roundup — something it didn’t do at all during Trump’s trial — and once again pounded the right-wing narrative on Hunter’s laptop:
With today’s coverage of the happenings of the Hunter Biden gun trial comes a major piece of vindication for anyone reporting or attempting to report on the existence (and, subsequently, the contents) of Hunter Biden’s “Laptop From Hell”. The major network newscasts (mostly) reported on the laptop, albeit tangentially and reluctantly.
[…]
NBC and ABC opened their reports with admissions that the laptop was a source of evidence in the trial, and then correspondents Ryan Nobles and Terry Moran, respectively, made one more mention of the laptop in their report. But that was it. Blink and you miss it.
But, having worked hundreds of trials in previous professional endeavors, I know that each individual piece of evidence requires authentication testimony before being admitted as a trial exhibit.
[…]
CBS were the lone holdouts, with no mention of the laptop whatsoever. Perhaps the Tiffany Network still believes the 51 former intel officers. Or in the Tooth Fairy.
Shame on anyone still pushing the lie that Hunter Biden’s “Laptop From Hell” was Russian disinformation, or otherwise a fabrication. Suppression of that story was, in and of itself, a grotesque act of election interference.
The truth can’t be suppressed forever.
Yes, Bonilla linked to the MRC’s bogus conspiracy theory that is based on buying polls from partisan right-wing pollsters — including Trump’s own election pollsters — to claim the election was stolen from Trump. He also ignored the fact that there was no reason to take the New York Post’s laptop story at face value because it’s a partisan pro-Trump rag, it provided no independent verification of the laptop at the time its story came out, which made it perfectly reasonable to question the story’s veracity and suspect that it was Russian disinformation. But the MRC demanded that the story never face questions despite the shady sourcing — something only die-hard partisans do — which made it look even more like it was in the bag for Trump.
Bonilla shouldn’t pretend there was no reason to question the story when it came out, even if it was ultimately proven accurate — a process that took many months. In his headline ranting that the laptop “WAS ALWAYS REAL,” Bonilla ignores that the New York Post originally made no effort to demonstrate that it was and expected people to take the word of a biased right-wing rag at face value.
The second day of the trial started with a June 5 post by Geoffrey Dickens ranting about something that had nothing to do with the trial:
While there has been network coverage (full of spin) of the Hunter Biden gun trial there have been and will continue to be certain newsworthy items they won’t tell you about. We will be using this space in the coming days to alert you to those developments.
Today we begin with the story of how Hunter Biden has blown threw so much of his benefactor Kevin Morris’s (AKA “Sugar Brother”) money that Morris’s daughter has complained about it.
Up until recently the Hollywood millionaire Morris had been covering Hunter’s legal fees but apparently he’s now “tapped out” of funds. It got so bad that Morris’s 23-year old daughter allegedly confronted Hunter face-to-face and scolded him: “stop taking advantage of my father.”
Amount of coverage on ABC, CBS, NBC evening and morning shows? 0 seconds.
This is just the latest example of the Big Three networks running damage control for Hunter and the Biden family.
As if Dickens and the MRC aren’t full of their own anti-Hunter spin.
Houck served up another “trial watch” item in which he again whined that non-right-wing networks treated Hunter like a human being:
On Wednesday morning, the “big three” of ABC, CBS, and NBC continued to surprisingly give full segment to the Hunter Biden trial, but this left the overall tally at 37 minutes (37:11) versus the 71 minutes (70:43) at this point in the Trump trial. On the substance, they all casually brought up Hunter Biden’s “controversial” laptop despite years of either denying its existence or brushing it aside.
ABC’s Good Morning America again had senior national correspondent Terry Moran provide helpings of pathetic sympathy for these supposedly downtrodden Bidens: “Because Hunter Biden is the President’s son, this case is seen as political by many, but for the Biden family, who so many American families have been caught up in the world with drug abuse and guns, this is personal and painful.”
Like the CBS and NBC would, Moran brought up Hunter’s relationship with his late brother Beau’s widow Hallie, but ignored how that caused his first marriage to fall apart to Kathleen Buhle.
Houck, however, failed to document Fox News’ trial coverage, even though it would have been useful for him to show how he thinks the trial should be covered (since it’s official MRC policy never to admit Fox News does anything wrong).
Michael Wnek grumbled that someone committed the offense of expressing sympathy for Hunter:
On Tuesday evening, MSNBC’s All In host Chris Hayes ranted about Hunter Biden’s trial, deciding that he was the target of a “draconian” prosecution. He also downplayed Biden’s alleged crime and sympathized with his “supportive” family, not even attempting to hide his partisan sentiments and presenting the whole situation as a great injustice.
Hayes began: “The current president of the United States, Joe Biden, and his First Lady, are quietly watching their last living son, Hunter, be prosecuted by the Biden Department of Justice.”
Questioning the legitimacy of the prosecutor, David Weiss, Hayes pointed to his position as a Trump Administration holdover and argued that he had overseen the case for far too long, i.e. five years. With this in mind, Hayes falsely depicted Biden as the victim of a vague and unsubstantial accusation: “The result is that Hunter Biden, who has been targeted for Republican conspiracy theories for the better part of a decade and endless hearings and the like, is now being prosecuted by the Department of Justice, in the person of David Weiss, for an incredibly arcane, alleged offense.”
In reality, the crime was quite straightforward and in Hayes’s own words, “Hunter Biden purchased a handgun in 2018, he lied on the federal form when he said he had not abused drugs.”
To support his claim of the ludicrous nature of the trial, he cited the supposedly disproportionate sentence Biden faced. “He possessed that handgun for, wait for it, 11 days. He lied on the form about his drug use. He had the handgun for 11 days. He now faces 25 years in prison,” Hayes scoffed.
The irony of his indignation as a host on MSNBC, which has been famously pro-gun control, was especially fascinating. Furthermore, Biden’s possession of the gun for a mere 11 days still exceeded the waiting periods in many states, including California, Washington State, as well as Washington, D.C., all of which seek to implement liberal pipe dreams for gun control.
Houck had another Fox News-less summary on June 6, which involved a lot of whining that non-right-wing coverage was diminishing:
ABC’s Good Morning America bid farewell Thursday to the first Hunter Biden trial (at least for now) with zero mentions during their news show ahead of what would be a critical day of testimony for the prosecution by Hunter’s former love/late brother Beau’s widow Hallie Biden. CBS Mornings and NBC’s Today, in contrast, still had full stories with the latter even conceding Biden’s only hope to evade guilty is sympathetic juror.
The coverage disparity from the Trump trial only widened with 49 minutes and 14 seconds since Monday on the network morning and evening shows compared to 74 minutes and 31 seconds at this point in the Trump trial.
Again, Houck refused to offer a coverage count for Fox News despite its usefulness to his comparison posts. P.J. Gladnick served up another laptop-obsessed post:
As some media outlets, albeit reluctantly, are finally admitting in their coverage of the Hunter Biden gun trial that the “Laptop From Hell” is real and not the result of Russian disinformation, a main source of that fake news story in 2020, Politico, is now avoiding its own highly embarrassing role in promoting the now discredited conspiracy theory. Perhaps Josh Gerstein and Betsy Woodruff Swan hoped we wouldn’t notice their attempt to deflect responsibility from Politico on Tuesday in “Prosecutors open their case against Hunter Biden by playing his own voice for the jury.”
Buried deep, deep down in their story — about 30 paragraphs deep — was this paragraph with the responsibility-deflection twist:
Jurors also saw first-hand the infamous laptop that Biden allegedly dropped off at a Delaware repair shop and never retrieved. The disclosure of its contents, including photos of Biden with drugs and in hotel rooms with women, caused a major dust-up in the 2020 presidential race, as Democrats insisted it was likely Russian propaganda and discussion about it was suppressed on social media sites.
“Democrats insisted it was likely Russian propaganda and discussion about it was suppressed on social media sites.” And who, pray tell, was at the forefront of giving the Democrats justification to promote the laptop disinformation as well as justification for social media sites to suppress the story? Why, none other than Politico itself.
As ConWebWatch has noted, there was no reason to trust anything at face value from the right-wing pro-Trump rag that initially pushed the laptop, and it offered no independent verification at the time that would have made anyone outside the right-wing bubble believe the story, and there was every reason to suspect it was disinformation.
Sarah Butler complained in another June 6 post that Hunter’s addiction issues were a reasonable defense:
On Wednesday, The Lead with Jake Tapper tried to argue that Hunter Biden held no liability for lying on his federal Firearm Transaction Record form because of how far “gone” on drugs he allegedly was when he bought his gun in 2018.
Victoria Nourse, former Chief Counsel for the then-Vice President Joe Biden, leaned on two statutes which would lead to the same outcome where Hunter Biden is found not guilty. Nourse alluded to the Fifth Circuit which concluded that disarming a sober citizen based primarily on past drug usage violated the Second Amendment.
[…]
Tapper noted how members of the jury have stated that they or somebody they know has been affected by addiction. He asked Tim Parlatore, CNN Legal Commentator, if these jurors could be effective when it comes to Biden’s defense. He answered, “I think it is going to be very effective. They may have personal experience with understanding this.”
In regards to the prosecution, Tapper noted that they were trying to so how cognitively incapable he was to possess a firearm. “He didn’t even get his private dance that obviously the prosecution is trying to make that point, like, look at how messed up he was or whatever,” he said.
Butler didn’t explain why it was a bad thing for Hunter to attempt that defense.
A June 7 “trial watch” post by Houck whined that the non-right-wing media was again treating Hunter like a human being:
Aside from a zero Thursday on ABC’s Good Morning America, the “Big Three” of ABC, CBS, and NBC have had segments on every newscast this week about Hunter Biden’s gun trial, but like we’ve seen, the flavor skewed heavily toward seeking sympathy for the First Son as he’s had to endure “dramatic”, “heartbreaking”, and “painful” details about his life being made public.
Between Thursday night and Friday morning, the broadcast network coverage total clicked over an hour to 60 minutes and 55 seconds (excluding teases). As usual, that paled in comparison to where they stood through four and a half days of the Trump trial, which clocked in at 96 minutes (96:13).
ABC’s Good Morning America was back with its predictable tract of seeking sympathy.
By contrast, the MRC was quite upset that Donald Trump’s life of debauchery was made public during his New York trial, which centered on him paying hush money to a porn star to cover up their alleged affair. And again, Houck failed to provide coverage statistics for Fox News for comparison purposes.
The same day, Mark Finkelstein huffed that it was pointed out that Hunter’s trial would have a negligible effect on the 2024 presidential election outside of a certain bubble of people, mischaracterizing the complaint in question:
You’d have to be some sort of hick from the sticks to take a Hunter Biden criminal conviction into account in deciding on your 2024 presidential vote.
That was Molly Jong-Fast’s gist on today’s Way Too Early, the Morning Joe pregame show. When host Jonathan Lemire asked the MSNBC political analyst whether there could be a negative political impact for Joe Biden stemming from a Hunter conviction, she suggested only hayseeds who can’t make fine moral distinctions could be misled:
“Yeah, I mean, I think, look, you know, there are low-information voters who are like, oh, they’re both in trouble with the law..”
Oh, those déclassé low-information voters! The kind who, unlike Jong-Fast, didn’t attend the Riverdale Country School and Barnard, and score a Master of Fine Arts from Bennington College. And whose mother isn’t the best-selling feminist novelist Erica Jong.
[…]
Note: Having viewed numerous MSNBC appearances by Jong-Fast, I’ve found myself bewildered by just what she is doing on national TV. Her diction is muddled, and the insights of this “political analyst” are pedestrian—at best.
This 2022 New York Times article provides insights on the matter. Entitled, “How Molly Jong-Fast Tweeted Her Way to Liberal Media Stardom,” it paints a picture of Jong-Fast that is admiring of her moxie in making the most of her connections, but not very flattering about her analytical chops.
At no point did Jong-Fast called people obsessed with Hunter’s trial “hayseeds,” as Finkelstein claimed. And Finkelstein failed to explain the relevance of his personal attack on Jong-Fast, given that he quoted her making no judgment on the education and income levels of the Hunter-obsessed; after all, one does not need to be a “hayseed” to be the type of “low-information voter” she was criticizing.
A June 8 post by Alex Christy whined that Hunter’s trial didn’t have the same implications for the country that Trump’s trial did:
When Washington Post associate editor and MSNBC host Jonathan Capehart and New York Times columnist David Brooks recapped former President Donald Trump’s conviction on PBS NewsHour one week ago, they hailed it as a victory for the rule of law and warned that anyone who dissented was simply being political and a grave threat to institutions. When it came to discussing Hunter Biden’s trial on Friday, they sang a different song.
Host Amna Nawaz declared, “I think it’s fair to say it was a very tough week, a lot of personal and embarrassing anecdotes and details that came out from a number of people, Beau Biden’s widow and his ex-wife — Hunter Biden’s ex-wife as well.”
[…]
Continuing in his lamentations, Capehart added, “Republicans have been trying to make Hunter Biden an issue for President Biden in an attempt to bring him down and the — quote, unquote — “Biden crime family.” But what we have in this trial in Wilmington has nothing to do with any kind of policy or any of the other things that Republicans have been talking about.”
And the falsification of business records to cover up an affair with a porn star was?
Apparently, Christy doesn’t believe that a current or former president should be held to a higher standard than a president’s son — and he certainly appears to believe that current or former president should be above the law.
Finkelstein returned for a June 10 post that reverted to the MRC’s weird anger that Hunter (along with his father) is treated like a human being instead of a partisan punching bag:
When it comes to making the case for Hunter Biden, Mika Brzezinski has managed to devise an alternative to pounding the table when the facts and the law are against you.
On today’s Morning Joe, Mika repeatedly got choked up when discussing the trials and tribulations of Hunter, and the Biden family at large.
And to be clear: the case against Hunter Biden is about as open-and-shut as can be.
[…]
Note: Mika repeatedly tried to twang the heartstrings. She twice mentioned that Hunter is Biden’s last “remaining son.” She mentioned that Joe had lost a wife and a baby in a car accident, and that son Beau had died of a brain tumor.
But whereas she claimed that Americans think Biden is a “nice guy,” she failed to mention that, for decades, Biden falsely claimed that his wife and daughter had been killed by a drunk driver. Biden has also falsely claimed, as even the leftist Daily Beast has acknowledged, that Beau died in Iraq.
And as for Biden being the loving father of Hunter, for years, Joe helped Hunter make piles of cash that he squandered on crack and hookers. Voters or jurors could see him (broad brush) as an enabler, not a stern dad. And it can be imagined that Joe enabled Hunter in part because the Big Guy was getting his “10 percent,” or a piece of the grift.
Finkelstein really needs to address his partisan anger issues that force him into kneejerk recitation of anti-Biden talking points about things that have absolutely nothing to do with the trial at hand. Is he still bizarrely mad that Trump’s sordid amorality was exposed during his trial?
a June 11 post by Rich Noyes hammering the MRC’s chief complaint throughout the trial, that non-right-wing media treated Hunter like a human being and not a right-wing punching bag:
A week after it began, the first of two criminal trials of President Biden’s son Hunter is now in the hands of the jury. A Media Research Center (MRC) analysis of ABC, CBS and NBC’s evening news coverage shows the broadcast networks have been far less interested in the felony trial of the Democratic President’s son than they were about the convoluted “hush money” case of Joe Biden’s GOP rival, Donald Trump, in New York City last month.
Trump is a former President, so some gap in coverage should be expected, as is the fact that there was no way for the broadcast networks to hide the criminal trial of any President’s son, nor for them to avoid the cringeworthy details of drug use at the center of the charges. But our analysis shows the networks have done their best to keep the coverage to a minimum, and to avoid any discussion of the more serious legal allegations surrounding Hunter’s business dealings.
And while TV coverage of Trump’s New York case often went out of its way to highlight the lurid and humiliating details, these networks have shown consistent sympathy towards an obviously dysfunctional First Family:
♦ While the networks deluged viewers with repeated references to Trump’s “criminal,” “felony” trial, nearly half of all references to Hunter’s case (47%) omitted those charged terms.
♦ ABC never mentioned, while CBS and NBC spent mere seconds, on the host of other legal issues surrounding the President’s son.
♦ The evening newscasts spent a grand total of just 40 seconds talking about Hunter’s laptop, and never acknowledged that they had falsely suggested the laptop was part of a “Russian disinformation campaign” four years ago.
♦ Viewers heard just 71 seconds of coverage of Joe Biden’s pledge not to pardon his son, and no suggestion from the networks that the President might change his mind after the election.
♦ While the coverage included a lot of negative information about Hunter’s drug use, reporters also exhibited sympathy for the President’s “only surviving son” and the “excruciatingly painful” testimony he was forced to hear.
Noyes also whined that non-right-wing media devoted “far less airtime” to Hunter’s trial than to Donald Trump’s New York trial — while, of course, deliberately refusing to examine how much time Fox News devoted to the trial and and comparing that to its Trump trial coverage, as well as the major difference that Hunter, unlike Trump, was never president and has never held elective office. Also note that despite being obsessed with describing the charges against Hunter as felonies, he never once uses that accurate descriptor for the charges Trump faced. He also didn’t explain why Trump paying hush money to a porn star to cover up their alleged affair should be treated as anything other than “lurid and humiliating” — even as he was gushing over the “cringeworthy details” of Hunter’s case.
Noyes’ whining about Hunter being treated as human continued:
Then on June 7, ABC’s Moran mourned: “For Hunter Biden, it was a day of deeply personal, anguishing testimony.”
Viewers heard no such concern for the feelings of President Trump or his family during his recent trial. The media’s kinder, gentler coverage of Hunter’s trial amounts to another election-year favor for Democrats, and it probably won’t be the last.
Noyes offered no evidence how the amoral adulterer (and, yes, convicted felon) Trump earned or deserved any sort of “kinder, gentler coverage.”