MARK JUDGE: The media dismissed Hunter Biden — while turning my life upside down.
On Friday, former CNN boss Jeff Zucker was confronted by CNN host Michael Smerconish over media bias. Smerconish challenged Zucker for not covering the scandal surrounding Hunter Biden’s laptop. Zucker and Smerconish were also joined by Phil Griffin, the former head of MSNBC.
Zucker said this: “Well, I mean, I think I think we, the question is, we did deal with it. But to the degree that, you know, you would have thought was appropriate, I think the answer is in the final two weeks, you know, it was looked at. We did not know enough about it.” Griffin similarly argued that MSNBC didn’t cover it because Hunter Biden “was never arrested. The Justice Department was looking into it, never reported it until he is the son of a candidate. I don’t think it’s a main story until that happens.”
That’s funny. Because in the fall of 2018, my entire life was turned upside down by the media. CNN and MSNBC were some of the worst offenders.
I was not related to any politician, and I had never been arrested. Yet I was a focal point of hour upon hour upon hour of coverage and speculation when the media, politicians, and opposition researchers, fueled by an absurdly vague accusation of sexual assault against my high school friend Brett Kavanaugh, decided to destroy my life and Brett’s to prevent him from getting on the Supreme Court.
Ronan Farrow, the redoubtable smear artist from the New Yorker, called me in early September 2018 and told me I was in a letter along with Brett, a letter that accused us of taking part in “sexual misconduct” in “the 1980s.” Farrow couldn’t tell me the specific time, the place, or even who the accuser was. Then, on Sept. 16, 2018, Emma Brown of the Washington Post broke the story: A woman named Christine Blasey Ford was accusing Brett of sexual assault. In her email to me that morning, Brown mentioned a woman named Leland Keyser, whom Ford claimed was at a party where Brett assaulted Ford.
However, in her final published story, Brown left Leland Keyser out. She did so because Keyser denied any such party ever took place — and would later tell the FBI that she had been threatened if she didn’t support Ford. Kimberly Strassel at the Wall Street Journal noticed the omission.
When Kevin Williamson was hired and then nearly-immediately fired in 2018 by the Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg after his crybully staffers melted down, Williamson reminded Goldberg that the Atlantic had always welcomed controversial authors, and specifically mentioned the late polemicist Christopher Hitchens. To which Goldberg replied, Godfather-style, “Yes. But Hitchens was in the family. You are not.” Hunter is definitely in the family, whereas Judge (and Kavanaugh) are not.
When you’re in the DNC-MSM’s family, you can get away with anything. Just ask Dan Rather, an unexpected postmodernist, in a May 2001 exchange with Bill O’Reilly that foreshadowed Rather’s downfall three and a half years later:
Does the Big Guy get a cut?