The MRC's Hunter Biden Derangement: The Trial, Part 2
The Media Research Center got the guilty plea it was hoping for, but was still angry that non-right-wing media gave him more sympathetic coverage than Donald Trump's trial got.
The Media Research Center’s coverage of Hunter Biden’s trial on gun-related charges was, needless to say, highly biased. When Hunter was found guilty on June 11, Alex Christy whined that it was pointed out that it was pointed out that President Biden didn’t interfere with the case while Trump did everything he could to weasel out of accountability:
When the news came down on Tuesday that Hunter Biden had been found guilty of the gun-related charges against him, the cast of Jose Diaz-Balart Reports only did what comes naturally to MSNBC: hype his father as the “embodiment of the rule of law” and promote his re-election campaign.
Donald Trump did not fire legal analyst Andrew Weissmann or his boss, Robert Mueller, when he was president, but that did not stop him from oozing, “One, the son of the sitting president was pretty quickly tried. He was given due process and he was found guilty. And you have the current president, the father of the defendant, making it absolutely clear that he is not pardoning him, that he could have ordered at any time his Justice Department to get rid of this case, he did not do that.”
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Chief political analyst Chuck Todd also got in on the Biden 2024 promotion, “I think it is possible that there’s a contrast here that the public may see how Trump and his partisans handle the rule of law versus how Biden and how his partisans handle the rule of law and I’ll be honest, I am– this is one of those cases where I don’t think it’s brought if Biden is not president of the United States.”
Would Trump’s business records case have been brought if he wasn’t running? MSNBC wasn’t interested in finding out. Instead, Todd continued, “In some ways, we may look back on this and say he was held more accountable because of who he is, and not less accountable because of who he is, not less accountable because of who he is.”
Christy is ignoring that, unlike Hunter, Trump has loudly whined that he was not being treated as above the law.
Nicholas Fondacaro complained that one channel seemed to be encouraging President Biden to pardon his son — behavior Fondacaro would completely accept if it came form Trump:
For months, the liberal media have praised President Biden as a supposed pillar of the rule of law and touted his promise that he would accept any verdict in his son Hunter’s felony gun crime trial. But following the three guilty verdicts on Tuesday, ABC News seemed to prime their audience to expect him to intercede with the full powers of the presidency. The network also pouted about the court reading the verdict without First Lady Jill Biden in the room.
Following the verdict, ABC interrupted The View to mournfully deliver the heartbreaking and devastating news for the Biden family. Chief legal analyst Dan Abrams was the first to float the idea that Biden could use a slippery technique to help his son. Abrams pointed out that while Biden had promised not to “pardon” his son, commuting whatever sentence he received could still be on the table:
And, of course, Fondacaro groused that the Bidens were treated as human:
Of course, this was part of their sympathetic framing of the Biden family. “[The First Lady] took a whirlwind trip to France to join the president for the D-Day commemorations and came right back to be with her son,” senior national correspondent Terry Moran noted, falsely suggesting Hunter was her biological son.
Rubin also quibbled over one of the jurors allegedly smiled just before the verdict was read. “Again, something we have talked about before the jury not looking at Hunter Biden. One of the jurors actually took his seat smiling, which was quite striking to see him smiling right before that verdict was read,” she claimed, without evidence.
Fondacaro didn’t explain why he’s demanding that everyone viciously and irrationally hate Hunter and the rest of the Bidens the way he does.
Tim Graham grumbled that it was pointed out that, unlike the Bidens, Trump doesn’t really engender sympathy:
In the aftermath of the three Guilty verdicts for Hunter Biden on Tuesday morning, CNN sounded mournful about the news, and sounded like the only people worth discussing were Bidens, like they’re a sympathetic royal family like the Kennedys. There was an empathy overload. You could have gotten a little sloshed if you drank every time they touted how First Lady Jill Biden was in the front row of the courtroom nearly every day.
It only turned negative when they turned over the mic to CNN reporter Kristen Holmes, whose beat is the Trump campaign. She noted that the Trump campaign put out an early statement, then withdrew it quickly in favor of a Truth Social post from the former president.
Holmes claimed “many Americans” find the Biden family sympathetic, but that meanie Donald Trump doesn’t!
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A lot of the coverage was repetitive. Holmes repeated her patter in the next hour, because she insisted it was “really significant” spin: Trump has shown “little or no sympathy” for Hunter and Joe Biden, despite losing a brother to alcoholism. He hasn’t “shown any compassion” for the Biden family.
Graham didn’t dispute that Trump lacks sympathy — he’s just mad it was brought up. And it wouldn’t be a Hunter-related post if the laptop couldn’t be worked in there somewhere:
The most slavishly pro-Biden opinion is encouraged, while the conservative CNN analysts are rare. Scott Jennings wasn’t on the set right after the verdicts, but he tweeted something that would have curled Bedingfield’s hair: “The most important thing about the Hunter trial is the laptop was proven real. Joe Biden, his campaign, & dozens of Democratic luminaries & media outlets were willing to lie about it and/or censor it despite knowing it was real. The amount of credibility burned is staggering.”
Contrary to Jennings’ narrative, the reason the laptop was doubted at first is because — as we’ve pointed out — the New York Post failed to offer any independent corroboration for it when the story broke, and there was no reason to trust the story at face value, coming as it did from partisan Trump operatives working with a right-wing pro-Trump rag.
A day after the verdict, the MRC continued to be weirdly angry that media outside its right-wing bubble treated him like a human being. Jorge Bonilla displayed that anger in a June 12 post:
Hunter Biden’s conviction on federal gun charges set the Regime Media into a firefighting frenzy with the aim of Protecting the Precious- in other words, ensuring that President Joe Biden faces as little political damage as possible over the verdict, and safeguarding the post-conviction narrative.
The most emblematic of this coverage comes via the most Biden-servile of the major three network newscasts. Here’s David Muir’s introduction to coverage of the verdict on ABC World News Tonight, which might have been serviceable as a standalone brief, but is needlessly cumbersome as an anchor intro to a longer report (click “expand” for transcript):
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It’s all there, really. The evocation of familial sympathy, referencing 54-year-old Hunter as A CHILD. Hunter walking out of court holding First Lady Doctor Jill Biden’s hand, President Joe Biden’s statement of support, the lament that Hunter’s addiction was used against him, and the presidential embrace. These were the themes that echoed across the networks. The verdict is covered as Kennedyesque tragedy- and Wilmington is Camelot-on-the-Delaware.
The firefighting part lies in the media’s use of this verdict as a stand-in for the totality of the Biden family crimes, and in contrasting President Biden’s acceptance of this verdict with President Trump’s rightful criticism of a government that has been weaponized against him, as evidenced in the New York business records trial.
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The Regime Media can try to pull this nonsense because they never reported on the testimony of the IRS whistleblowers, which detailed the MILLIONS spent by Hunter on, among many other things, literal “hookers and blow” in lieu of paying taxes on monies made while serving as a board member at Burisma.
This passing mention of the September trial on NBC was more than ABC and CBS could muster, which was ZERO.
News coverage on the verdict was crafted to deflect away both from the more serious charges Hunter Biden faces, and from the Biden family’s long history of peddling influence. If it weren’t for Regime Media, we’d have no media at all.
Bonilla made no mention of the dozens of NewsBusters posts that had to stealthily corrected in the wake of one key alleged witness against Hunter turning out to be a liar and a Russian operative — which puts all of the allegations against Hunter in doubt.
Graham’s June 12 column rehashed previous MRC complaining about Hunter being treated much better outside the right-wing bubble than Donald Trump:
The nation’s most self-impressed journalists, the ones who strangely self-identify as “mainstream,” could not bring themselves to treat the Hunter Biden trial as comparable in any way to Donald Trump’s trial in Manhattan. Treating Hunter as a significant “news” subject gives them the creeps, like they’ve been drafted into Rupert Murdoch’s army.
So it’s a little shocking the Hunter trial gained about half as much coverage as Trump’s — at least through the first eight days of coverage. On the ABC, CBS, and NBC morning, evening, and Sunday-interview shows, Trump’s trial drew more than 174 minutes, while Hunter’s trial drew 85 minutes. (By the Trump trial’s end, they filled the air with 640 minutes.)
It’s less shocking to notice the difference in tone. Trump’s trial was a “criminal” trial about “hush money.” On April 25, fill-in CBS anchor Margaret Brennan announced, “The former president faces 34 felony counts of falsifying business documents related to a so-called hush money payment to a porn star.” Other stories fussed that Trump was bullying and threatening witnesses and court staff.
Hunter Biden stories were loaded with empathy. On June 3, ABC’s Terry Moran relayed: “President Biden released a statement standing by his only surviving son, saying in part ‘I have boundless love for my son.’” CBS’s Norah O’Donnell echoed him that night on “the President’s only surviving son.” On June 10, NBC fill-in anchor Tom Llamas began: “For the first time, the child of a sitting president facing a potential criminal conviction. Right now, a jury deliberating the fate of Hunter Biden, the sole surviving son of the president.”
Hunter Biden is 54 and network anchors refer to him as a “child.”
The contrast in tone tells you that the media elites loathe Trump, but treat the Biden family like they’re close friends who they want to surround and protect.
Graham made sure to slip in a little luridness to distract from Trump’s handing out hush money to a porn star:
They will keep spinning in desperation that Hunter Biden’s epic crack-and-hookers binges somehow make the Bidens more sympathetic to Americans with addicts in their family. Journalists were given cocaine-powdered lemons, and the lemonade they are making is a heady brew. But not everyone wants to drink it.
Fondacaro spent a post claiming to be horrified that ABC put a juror on camera:
Following the three felony convictions of Hunter Biden on Tuesday, ABC seemingly exposed the identity of one of the jurors against his will. The contrast was obvious, ABC broadcasted his face across the country while CBS News and NBC News both noted that he didn’t want his identity revealed and took precautions to protect him.
ABC senior national correspondent Terry Moran seemingly ambushed Juror 10 in a parking garage somewhere and shoved the camera in his face, wanted to know why and how they convicted President Biden’s “only survived son”:
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It would be bizarre for Juror 10 to give ABC permission to show his face but deny it for the others. It seems as though ABC may not have disclosed that protecting his identity was an option.
Fondacaro offered no evidence that the juror objected to being on camera, and we could find no statement by the juror objecting to it.
Joe Scarborough-obsessed Mark Finkelstein was upset that the MSNBC host offered advice to President Biden in talking about Hunter’s conviction:
On today’s Morning Joe, informal Biden adviser Joe Scarborough offered his boy a word-for-word script to be used should Trump raise Hunter’s gun convictions during the upcoming presidential debate.
Scarborough should have saved his advice for one of those occasions when, as he bragged about on Tuesday’s Morning Joe, he talks to Biden “for hours at a time.”
Because at this point, should Biden manage to mouth Scarborough’s script during the debate, his words would be juxtaposed with Scarborough’s suggestion. Embarrassing!
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Be that as it may, the gist of Scarborough’s advice was that Biden should emphasize that Trump is running against him, not against his family, and that Trump is the only candidate with felony convictions, 34 of them. This doesn’t address that Trump’s statement on the Hunter verdicts turned right to attacking the “Biden crime family.” Trump will go right to Joe Biden’s role helping his son enrich himself by meeting with and talking with his clients, including powerful people in Russia, China, Ukraine, and other countries.
Finkelstein didn’t mention all those NewsBusters posts that had to be very quietly corrected because the key witness is a lying Russian operative, and he didn’t mention that Scarborough is not alone in having the ear of a sitting president; Fox News host Sean Hannity had near-nightly conversations with Trump while president.
Michael Wnek whined that an MSNBC host juxtaposed Hunter’s trial with Trump’s:
On Tuesday night’s episode of The ReidOut, MSNBC host Joy Reid juxtaposed the trials of Hunter Biden and former President Donald Trump, specifically pointing out what she felt was “ironic” about them. Throughout the entirety of the segment, she shamelessly empathized with Biden, smeared Republicans, and expressed concern over the future consequences of his felony conviction.
Reid first poked at the difference in support displayed for Biden versus Trump. “Hunter Biden was surrounded at his federal trial by loved ones including his mom, First Lady Jill Biden. During his trial, she was there nearly every day, showing him love and support,” she fawned.
She mocked Trump’s support, which mainly consisted of “federal political surrogates, who even cosplayed in their best Trump look-alike outfits,” and blasted the “rare appearances” of his family members.
When Reid pointed out right-wingers’ lax attitude toward gun regulations, Wnek huffed in response:
Her claim that “the right doesn’t believe in any restrictions on gun ownership” was patently false. The National Rifle Association was one of the driving organizations behind federal background checks to begin with. The true hypocrite in this scenario was Reid who was obviously anti-gun rights but was fine with a drug addict breaking the law to obtain one. That’s not to mention the brevity of ownership of a firearm doesn’t negate the criminality of illegal possession or the ability to commit a crime with it.
In fact, the NRA has lobbied against expansion of background checks.
After the trial
The Media Research Center closed out its coverage of Hunter Biden’s trial the way it began — by whining that non-right-wing media treated him as a human being and not a partisan punching bag. Clay Waters grumbled in a June 13 post:
Hunter Biden, the president’s son, was convicted this week of lying to a federally licensed gun dealer and thus illegally possessing a firearm in 2018. The Biden family got the full-on mawkish treatment from painfully sympathetic reporter Katie Rogers in Wednesday’s New York Times. “A Guilty Verdict for Hunter Biden Weighs on a Worried President Biden.”
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Rogers gave the president points for staying close to his troubled son, which really isn’t the highest bar to clear.
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In September 2023, Rogers also treated the Hunter Biden crime story as a sentimental family one under the headline “Biden Puts Son First, In Spite of Political Price.”
Christy spent a June 15 post complaining that Republican hypocrisy was called out:
PBS News Hour may have launched a rebranding campaign this week with a new studio and a new name that now makes News Hour two words instead of one, but that doesn’t mean the weekly Friday recap with New York Times columnist David Brooks and Washington Post columnist and pinch hitter for Jonathan Capeheart, E.J. Dionne, was any better as the duo insisted Hunter Biden is a victim of politics and that Republicans are hypocrites.
Host Geoff Bennett began with Brooks and asked, “David, has the GOP’s argument that Joe Biden is ordering prosecutors to target his political opponents, has that been undercut by the fact that Joe Biden’s Justice Department successfully prosecuted his son?”
Brooks began by repeating what he said a week ago, “Yeah, I guess so, yes. No — well, a couple of things. I do not think Hunter Biden would be having these trials if his dad wasn’t president. I think he was in a terrible mess. He was addicted to drugs. He signed some false documents. Yeah, that’s bad.”
He then recalled, “But the guy was leading a very sad and pathetic life, which he’s trying to climb his way out of. And so, as I said on the NewsHour last week, I just felt so much sadness reading all that he went through and all that he did. And I don’t think, if he had a — didn’t have a high-profile father, he would be suffering this increased conviction of a felony. I think they would have said, okay, you did this. Let’s wrap it up. And so I think he’s — in some sense, he’s a troubled guy who’s the victim of his father — of politics, frankly.”
Dionne agreed, “I see — in terms of the tragedy here, I see it very much as David did.”
Turning to Republicans, he lamented, “It was a little dispiriting to see Republicans, on the one hand, say, we got to sort of live by this case, respect the jury, they found him guilty, these were legitimate charges, and then, when asked about a certain jury in New York with a certain other person, ‘oh, well, that is totally different.’”
Republicans would say that is too simplistic because there were real problems with the Trump case, but Dionne wasn’t convinced, “And, yeah, I suppose they could argue if they want about the case that was brought, but the case was very clear and involved some real crimes that were committed linked to a cover-up. And yet it’s okay to prosecute Hunter Biden, not to prosecute Donald Trump? There’s something wrong with that.”
What real crimes were linked to a cover up? Nobody knows for sure because the D.A. didn’t specify and the judge didn’t make him.
As ConWebWatch has pointed out, the specific crimes that were covered up are irrelevant here, since the crime being charged against Trump is falsifying business records to conceal a crime.
Tim Graham brought in general accusations about Hunter and the Biden family in a June 16 post:
Taxpayer-funded National Public Radio wasn’t hiding its partisan stripes on the day of the guilty verdicts for Hunter Biden. On The NPR Politics Podcast, NPR senior political correspondent Mara Liasson said there was “no evidence” of Hunter and the Bidens taking millions from foreign influence-peddling.
She said with Donald Trump, “all criticism is confession” when he complains about a weaponized Justice Department. She summarized his criticism as “Heads I win, tails, you cheated.”
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One can argue the Biden influence-peddling is not a crime, but it’s just silly to say there’s “no evidence” of an influence-peddling mountain of millions.
Graham failed to mention that he had to correct dozens of NewsBusters posts after it was revealed that one key alleged witness against Hunter turned out to be a liar and a Russian operative — which raises questions about all of the allegations against Hunter.
Waters similarly groused in another post that day:
Does PBS stand for Partisan Broadcasting Service?
Hunter Biden, son of the president, was found guilty by a Wilmington, Delaware jury Tuesday of three felonies related to a gun purchase he made in 2018 while under the influence of drugs. PBS NewsHour White House reporter Laura Barron-Lopez empathy-fueled story hailed President Joe Biden both as father figure and defender of the judicial process, while his wife Jill Biden was in the courtroom amid “concern about a potential relapse” by Hunter after the guilty verdict against him.
Then things took a political turn, with Barron-Lopez posing Trump and Republicans as hurling “baseless” accusations against President Biden while Democrats defended the rule of law by respecting the judicial process. Funny how those same Democrats tear down the right-leaning Supreme Court at every opportunity without being criticized by the mainstream press.
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But to declare Republican accusations “baseless,” Barron-Lopez had to ignore, among other things, Joe Biden falsely stating in 2019 that he’d never spoken to his son about his business dealings, and the contents of Hunter’s infamous laptop (evidence confirmed as legitimate by the FBI after Big Tech banned its mention on social media before the 2020 election) contain messages indicating that President Biden showed up to meet Hunter’s foreign business clients at fancy restaurants. He has appeared with Hunter’s clients in photographs.
To say there is no evidence of Joe’s involvement is like saying there’s no evidence that Hunter had a cocaine problem.
He too failed to mention the discredited witness.
Graham returned to use Hunter’s conviction to downplay Trump’s crimes in his June 28 column:
The Left can’t stand that anyone would think Hunter Biden becoming a convicted felon waters down their talking point that Trump is a convicted felon. They worked hard to inflate some accounting entries for legal expenses into felonies. It’s much less serious in their minds that a crack addict lied about being an addict on a gun-purchase form so he was able to buy a gun that was later thrown in a trash can near a school.
After Hunter Biden was found guilty of three felonies, Democrats tried to argue that having a “convicted felon” in both presidential families meant the Biden Justice Department wasn’t partisan or “weaponized.”
Then the weaponizing began. Before the first presidential debate in Atlanta, the Democratic National Committee bought five billboards saying (in all capital letters) “Donald, welcome to Atlanta for the first time since becoming a convicted felon. Congrats – or whatever.”
Graham ignores the fact that Hunter is not a politician and has never held or even run for public office, while Trump was the president, who should be held to a higher standard and which automatically makes his crimes more prominent, however much Graham tries to minimize them by dismissing 34 felonies as merely issues with “accounting entries” and censoring the fact that Trump paying hush money to a porn star to cover up an alleged affair is at the center of it.
Late-night complaints
Just as the MRC’s resident comedy cop, Alex Christy, raged that Donald Trump’s New York trial was discussed on late-night TV and his guilty verdict got approval there, he was upset that Hunter Biden’s trial didn’t get the same treatment. Christy grumbled in a June 12 post:
All five of the late night comedy talk show hosts managed to acknowledge the existence of Hunter Biden’s guilty verdict on their Tuesday shows, but mentioning something is not the same thing as joking about it. Instead, the quintet used the verdict to go after Donald Trump, Republicans, and lament the lack of gun control in America.
On CBS, The Late Show host Stephen Colbert reported on Hunter’s guilty verdict and replied, “Now, that is truly shocking news. Evidently, in America, there is a wrong way to buy a gun. I didn’t know that. I had no idea. I’ve never heard that before.”
Colbert also didn’t see what the big deal was, “Now, it’s no secret how I feel about Trump’s conviction. So, ethically and morally, I have to be consistent and say that, in light of this verdict, I don’t believe Hunter Biden should be president.”
Over at ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel Live!, the eponymous host declared that “His father did a terrible job of rigging this. He really– Hunter was convicted on three felony gun charges, which means he’s now only 31 felonies away from being the Republican nominee for president.”
After reading President Joe Biden’s statement that read, in part, “Jill and I will always be there for Hunter and the rest of our family with our love and support. Nothing will ever change that,” a sarcastic Kimmel again turned to Trump, “Same thing Trump would say about Eric in this situation, you know?”
All five of the comedy shows had great fun with the sordid details of Trump’s case, but jokes about the similar details of Hunter’s case have been harder to come by. Still, Kimmel noted, “They both filed phony paperwork. Hunter lied on his application to buy a gun. Trump falsified business records. The only difference is one of them was on crack when it happened.”
Over at NBC and Late Night, Seth Meyers used the verdict to mock Trump and Fox News’s Sean Hannity, “Hunter Biden was found guilty today on all counts in his federal gun trial and now faces up to 25 years on Hannity. According to new analysis, first lady Dr. Jill Biden’s round trip flight from France to Delaware to attend Hunter Biden’s federal gun trial could cost taxpayers as much as $345,000. Say what you will about Trump, but he never spent a dime of taxpayer money to be with his kids.”
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Over at The Tonight Show on NBC, Jimmy Fallon pulled out his Trump voice, “”I’ve always said our legal system is fair and just. And this is just another example of justice finally being served.”
Fallon also briefly mentioned some of the unflattering details, “What was Hunter guilty of, lying about being on drugs while buying a gun? I mean, when did that become a crime?”
For the men of late night, even scandals that involve Democrats are opportunities to go after Republicans, which is how you arrive at a greater than 4:1 ratio of jokes targeting conservatives.
ConWebWartch has documented how Christy’s evaluations of late-night comedy deliberately exclude any evaluation of Fox News’ Greg Gutfeld, since he would make those numbers look more balanced and, thus, less click-worthy and less supportive of his preferred narrative. He also made no apparent effort to document any jokes Gutfeld might have told about Hunter — narrative over truth, after all.
Christy is also deliberately ignoring the fact that there’s a difference between a former president committing crimes and the son of a president who has never run for office or worked to be in the public eye, since doing so would undermine his attempts to handwave Trump’s crimes.