NPR boss admits mistake made by dismissing Hunter Biden laptop story

It's certainly amusing how people are suddenly willing to admit their mistakes when their funding is at stake.

Such is the case with NPR boss Katherine Maher, who just had a come-to-Jesus moment over the limiting of the Hunter Biden laptop story during the 2020 election cycle.

Social Media Sites Block Story

When the New York Post story hit, it was immediately attacked by every mainstream media out there.

So much to the point that Facebook and Twitter decided to limit the story’s exposure, more or less killing the reach of the story on their platforms to ensure nobody saw it.

The New York Post story had its ducks in a row, yet both outlets claimed their fact-checkers were validating the story, to which the Post replied, "Our story explains where the info came from, and a Senate committee now confirms it also received the files from the same source. Yet Facebook and Twitter are deliberately trying to keep its users from reading and deciding for themselves what it means."

This was blatant censorship to help Biden win the election, and it worked.

The Letter

In addition to the story being killed on social media, 51 former intelligence officers tagged the story as Russian misinformation, or correctly, likely Russian misinformation, but that is not how the media pitched the story.

The letter, in part, stated that the laptop story “has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.” They made no definitive statement, but that did not matter as far as Biden and the media were concerned.

For instance, Politico ran a story headlined, “Hunter Biden story is Russian disinfo, dozens of former intel officials say.” And we all know most people only read headlines, and that is a very definitive statement.

During the debate, when Trump brought it up, Biden referred to the letter claiming they had debunked the story, but that was far from the case. Shamefully, the moderators did not correct Biden, and even though not a single one of those officials examined any evidence, the story was dead in the water.

It Was a Mistake

With funding for NPR on the chopping block, NPR CEO Katherine Maher had decided to come clean about killing the story on her outlet, which is funded with our tax dollars.

During a recent hearing being held by a DOGE subcommittee, she stated, "I do want to say that NPR acknowledges we were mistaken in failing to cover the Hunter Biden laptop story more aggressively and sooner.”

When the story was out there, NPR managing editor Terence Samuel took a different approach, stating at the time, "We don't want to waste our time on stories that are not really stories, and we don't want to waste the listeners’ and readers’ time on stories that are just pure distractions. And quite frankly, that's where we ended up, this was … a politically driven event, and we decided to treat it that way."

That would be because other than the New York Post, nobody actually bothered to investigate the story until after the election, when it was too late. They knew what they were doing, and it was far too late to apologize for it.