Fox News passed on Hunter Biden story

Being an anchor means that you can get Dan Rathered out of your job. I doubt that will happen the Post reporter who let them put their name on this.

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Good old Rudy!

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We all wish Wendi Deng had finished the job, and with good reason. But this story shows why our media crisis can’t be boiled down simply to the existence of News Corp.

In an immediate sense, all the worst things about 2020 can be traced to the evil alternate reality that Fox News enables. If outlets like Fox didn’t exist, the respectable media would collude to ensure most people never heard of QAnon, or covid denial, or absurd claims that Turmp is somehow not a criminal. (They’d collude in lots of other ways, too, but on balance, that doesn’t sound nearly as bad as it used to).

So Fox is a key ingredient, yes; but what we see here is that the media’s obsession with itself is just as instrumental, and Murdoch isn’t to blame for that. Respectable media can ignore dumb stories, but they can’t ignore anything that gets attention from another media outlet, no matter how dumb. The Times and CNN and network news all agree the Hunter Biden stuff shouldn’t be news, but they just physically can’t stop themselves covering the fact that the Post picked it up, which makes it news.

If Fox disappeared today, this would still happen. Anything that went viral on Twitter or Facebook would still end up as a mainstream news story, because no one in the “serious” media knows how to stop doing this. If they could, it wouldn’t matter what Fox News did.

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They don’t, even in this story. The (fake) scandal was that there was an email about some Ukraine meeting on there. I have no idea where this kiddie pron story came from. It seems like, when this fake “scandal” didn’t catch fire and was greeted with a collective yawn, some Republicans started implying, unconnected to any reality, that there was kiddie pron, in a desperate attempt to create some sort of a scandal and get QAnoners fired up. The problem is, no one previously mentioned that, and if that had been part of the original set-up, they would have been talking about that, not an obviously bogus Ukraine email.

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Journalistic integrity at Fox News? Boy this really is 2020.

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Except that they seem to find themselves with positions and security clearances.

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Good hell @beschizza, that portrait might be your best one yet.

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But . . . I thought that was just Ghouliani’s real eyes?

IVANKA LITERALLY SAT IN ON PRIVATE SUMMIT TALKS BETWEEN DONALD AND KIM JONG UN!

Geez, that’s like a test pilot letting his daughter fly the plane on take-your-daughter-to-work day!

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I think you all are missing the point: the rest of his family being grifters becomes irrelevant the second he leaves office. They didn’t get into these positions on their own, and nobody will tolerate them without daddy in the White House

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And until that time, and especially as he runs for reelection, it remains very relevant.

ETA: To bring this back on topic, if Biden had floated his son’s name as a potential VP, or otherwise seemed likely to give him access or an official role, looking closely at Hunter would be relevant too.

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No, that’s like a con man without any flying experience who conned himself into a job as a test pilot letting his daughter fly the plane on take-your-daughter-to-work day!

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