Several mainstream media outlets, including the New York Times, the Washington Post, and CBS News, have authenticated key files from Hunter Biden’s laptop.
Welcome back to Forgotten Fact Checks, a weekly column produced by National Review’s News Desk. This week, we refute AOC’s false claims on the Hunter Biden laptop story, draw attention to a misleading ABC News piece, and hit more media misses.
AOC’s Fake Fact-CheckLast week, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y.) labeled the New York Post’s October 2020 report on Hunter Biden’s laptop “half fake” despite a mountain of evidence to the contrary.
“We’re talking about Hunter Biden’s half-fake laptop story. I mean, this is an embarrassment,” the congresswoman said at a House Oversight Committee hearing on Twitter’s censorship of the laptop story.
While the progressive “Squad” member could perhaps have been excused for that belief two years ago — when much of the mainstream media and a group of more than 50 former senior intelligence officials dismissed the story as Russian disinformation — her comments now show a complete disconnect from reality.
The New York Times has since authenticated key files from the laptop, as has the Washington Post. CBS News was late to the party, but reported in November 2022 that it had conducted an independent review of Biden’s laptop which showed “no evidence” that the laptop hard drive “was faked or tampered with.”
After analyzing the hard drive, digital forensic investigator Mark Lanterman told CBS News that a voicemail from President Biden in which he tells Hunter he has to “get some help” with his drug problem helps confirm its authenticity. Other recovered images of credit cards, a driver’s license, and a Social-Security number offered further proof for the review.
“Just the sheer volume of what we’re dealing with, it would be difficult if not impossible to fabricate,” another analyst told CBS News.
Nonetheless, Ocasio-Cortez claimed the New York Post was to blame for its own Twitter ban.
“The New York Post had this alleged information and was trying to publish it without any corroboration, without any backup information, they were trying to publish it to Twitter, Twitter would not let them — and now they are upset,” Ocasio-Cortez claimed.
Rep. @AOC repeatedly refers to @nypost's reporting on Hunter's laptop contents as "alleged," then blames the Post for Twitter censoring them, saying they should have shared more info about their sourcing on this "fake story" pic.twitter.com/1k56oK8Llh
— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) February 8, 2023
The decision to block the Hunter Biden report was made without the knowledge of Twitter’s former CEO Jack Dorsey, according to journalist Matt Taibbi’s “Twitter files” reporting.
“They just freelanced it,” a former Twitter employee told Taibbi of Twitter’s reasoning for censoring the story, according to his report. “Hacking was the excuse, but within a few hours, pretty much everyone realized that wasn’t going to hold. But no one had the guts to reverse it.”
At the time, Trenton Kennedy, former U.S. policy communications manager at Twitter, pressed Vijaya Gadde and Yoel Roth for answers. Gadde served as Twitter’s head of legal, policy, and trust, while Roth was the platform’s trust and safety chief.
“I’m struggling to understand the policy basis for marking this unsafe, and I think the best explainability argument for this externally would be that we’re waiting to understand if this story is the result of hacked materials,” Kennedy wrote to senior staff. “We’ll face hard questions on this if we don’t have some kind of solid reasoning for marking the link unsafe.”
Despite Twitter’s concerning — and proven — censorship of the story, Ocasio-Cortez cast doubt on the need for an oversight hearing, saying: “I believe that political operatives who sought to inject explosive disinformation with the Washington Post couldn’t get away with it. And now they’re livid and they want the ability to do it again. They want the ability to inject this again. They are weaponizing the use of this committee.”
While the fight between Twitter and the New York Post led to the paper being locked out of its account for more than two weeks, Ocasio-Cortez said it was merely a “24-hour hiccup in a right-wing political operation.”
Just days after her false claims on the Hunter Biden story, Ocasio-Cortez received criticism for her comments on a set of Super Bowl commercials from the Christian group He Gets Us.
“Something tells me Jesus would *not* spend millions of dollars on Super Bowl ads to make fascism look benign,” Ocasio-Cortez wrote in a tweet.
He Gets Us, which is funded in part by the family behind Hobby Lobby, spent $20 million on Super Bowl advertisements, according to reports. One ad featured a series of black-and-white images of migrants fleeing their homes to avoid persecution. The ad ultimately reveals that the story is about Jesus, his mother Mary, and her husband Joseph.
A separate ad depicted violent confrontations between people over racial justice, pandemic lockdowns, and politics and then said, “Jesus loved the people we hate.”
The ads, which were an effort to spread the message of Jesus to communities that have felt unwelcome by Christianity, led viewers to a website featuring Bible readings and information about Jesus.
While the ads were met with mixed reactions from people of varying political and religious affiliations, it was unclear what part of the ads Ocasio-Cortez believed were akin to “fascism.”
Headline Fail of the Week
ABC News published a failed “gotcha” on Florida this week: “Florida schools directed to cover or remove classroom books that are not vetted.”
While the story initially painted the instructions as a statewide directive, it was in fact limited to a single county and only impacted “at least one” school.
While the headline stands, the outlet was forced to affix a correction to the piece that reads, “This story has been updated to reflect the directive was only issued for Manatee County, and was not a state directive.”
The piece focuses on at least one school that is “covering up or removing books in their classrooms that have not been approved under a law restricting instruction and books on race and diversity and making it a felony for teachers to share pornographic material to students.”
Michael Barber, a Manatee County schools spokesman, said the schools acted out of an abundance of caution and may have overreacted, according to the story.
Bryan Griffin, press secretary to Florida governor Ron DeSantis, shared the story on Twitter and said, “The big lie in the headline, an article that heavily focuses on critic perspectives, and small clarifications embedded in the text of the article to build their fertile fallacy. Corporate media deliberately buries the truth within their narrative, hoping it will go unnoticed.”
The big lie in the headline, an article that heavily focuses on critic perspectives, and small clarifications embedded in the text of the article to build their fertile fallacy.
Corporate media deliberately buries the truth within their narrative, hoping it will go unnoticed. pic.twitter.com/R8zVV5S7L7
— Bryan Griffin (@BryanDGriffin) February 12, 2023
Media Misses
-A vaguely-worded Washington Post Instagram graphic claims half of kids fell below grade level in at least one subject “thanks to covid.” The post fails to acknowledge that it was prolonged and often unnecessary school closures that led to the loss in learning.
-The Washington Post published an essay by Kate Aguilar, an assistant professor of “African American and sports history” at Gustavus Adolphus College in Minnesota that attempts to explain why it “took until 2023 for two Black QBs to start in a Super Bowl.” The essay claims “ideas dating back to slavery have minimized opportunities for Black quarterbacks in the NFL.”
“The matchup between Mahomes and Hurts has been decades in the making, as Black players, including these quarterbacks, have worked to bust century-old myths surrounding Black people, athletes, intellect and leadership that have historically prevented Black players from getting a chance at quarterback in the NFL,” the essay reads.
-ESPN commentator Chris Berman also needlessly chose to draw attention to the race of quarterbacks in a curious manner when he said: “Also, of course, two African American quarterbacks starting against each other in the Super Bowl for the first time. Fittingly, February 12th is Abe Lincoln’s birthday.”
-Melissa Weiss, the managing editor of Jewish Insider, called attention to the contrasts in how Reuters covered two recent news stories out of Israel:
The “two Israelis” were six- and eight-year old brothers. The “Palestinian teenager who dreamt of being a chef” shot a teenager and his father. pic.twitter.com/oGEh8IqZxX
— Melissa Weiss (@melissaeweiss) February 12, 2023