Cowardly media coverage is giving Joe Biden an easy ride over the Ukraine scandal

“I have no response…” Well, that is a first for a politician, especially for an American presidential candidate just two weeks before the election; but that is what Joe Biden said in reply to the question: “Mr Biden, what is your response to the New York Post story about your son, sir?”

 Although the question was posed objectively and courteously, almost sycophantically, by CBS news reporter Bo Erickson, the full non-answer from Biden was an angry rant: “I have no response, it’s another smear campaign, right up your alley, those are the questions you always ask.”

That is true enough, provided the question is being put to a Republican. But when did CBS make a habit of asking questions embarrassing to Democrats? Biden’s pretence of being exasperated by habitual adverse questioning (by CBS!) was the indignant reaction of Entitlement to the least hint of interrogation or challenge. 

There was, however, a deeper significance to Biden’s reaction: his refusal, shared by his entire campaign, to deny the authenticity of the alleged Hunter Biden emails published by the New York Post. The nearest the Biden camp has come to any kind of rebuttal is the claim that there is no entry for Joe Biden’s alleged meeting with Vadym Pozharskyi, a senior executive of Ukrainian natural gas company Burisma Holdings, in the vice-president’s official schedule (were Bill Clinton’s assignations with Monica Lewinsky formally announced in his public diary?).

The most notable feature of this scandal is that, while Big Tech and the mainstream media have stampeded to censor the claims of the New York Post, absolutely nobody with access to the facts – not one member of the Biden family – has stated that the emails are not genuine. The rawest cub reporter on a local newspaper would recognise the significance of that.

Yet the vast American media apparatus, the once formidable investigative mechanism that enabled Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward on The Washington Post to expose Watergate in 1972 and bring down an incumbent president, has not made the slightest move to investigate the Biden scandal. “Move along, nothing to see here,” is the response. “Even if all the emails are true, they don’t establish a scandal,” claimed an opinion piece in The Washington Post, which clearly has no stomach for a contemporary Watergate investigation.

 Eh? Come again? If Joe Biden received millions of dollars from Ukraine, Russia and, by far the largest alleged payments, from China, that would not establish a scandal? That seems to indicate a degree of flawed judgement. If the emails were all true, to any rational observer they would represent the scandal of the decade. More significantly, even supposing all the emails to be false, they represent the challenge of a generation to investigative reporters. Why are they not rising to that challenge?

Because the American media have degenerated from a formidable Fourth Estate, speaking unpalatable truth to power, and have instead embraced the culture of Pravda and Iszvestia. In a “woke” consensus there is only one politically correct line: pluralism is treason. The destruction of Donald Trump and the Republican Party has become an all-consuming passion within the mainstream media, including social media, to a fanatical degree that has abolished all former journalistic principles. There has been a cultural revolution in Western media and it is determinedly propelling Joe Biden towards the White House.

While the print and broadcast media have blanked out coverage of the Biden issue, apart from some dismissive whitewashing and risible “fact checking”, Twitter and Facebook have gone further in censorship by actively interdicting the free exchange of information among citizens online. That is straight out of the Beijing playbook. The internet was formerly regarded as a safety net against bias in print and broadcast media, but there are now moves to impose a level of censorship on social media platforms that would create a leftist monopoly in communication.

This represents an appalling negation of freedom. That there should be a concerted effort to keep millions of Americans in ignorance of serious allegations against a presidential candidate two weeks before election day makes a travesty of democracy. The notion that it is “unfair” to examine allegations against Joe Biden is absurd: it would be unfair to accept them without corroboration, which is a different thing. But corroboration or refutation can only be established quickly by a general drive to discover the truth, across all media.

It is the Left’s interdiction of any such universal endeavour in the national interest that has made many people more inclined to give credit to the New York Post story. The gradually converging facts begin to create a discernible pattern. The Director of National Intelligence, John Ratcliffe, has ruled out a Russian disinformation operation, such as Adam Schiff, House Intelligence Committee chairman, and other Democrats were quick to claim. The FBI and Department of Justice officials now appear to concur with the DNI.

It transpires that the alleged Biden laptop has been in the possession of the FBI since 9 December, 2019. Why did the FBI not reveal its contents during the Trump impeachment trial earlier this year? If the emails are authentic, they reveal large sums of money from Russia, Ukraine and China being paid to the Biden family, including the presidential candidate. There has been much discussion of the Bidens’ Ukrainian and Russian connections, but by far the most contentious, if true, is the claim that Hunter Biden was contracted to earn $30m over three years from the now defunct Chinese company CEFC China Energy.

Fox News claims it has been able to confirm the authenticity of this email with one of its recipients and that the “big guy” referred to in it as earmarked to receive $10m was Joe Biden: granted, Fox News is a pro-Trump channel, but this is the kind of digging all media outlets should be engaged in. An August 2017 email allegedly stated that the deal had since become “much more interesting to me and my family” because it included a share of “the equity and profits”.

As the Wall Street Journal has pointed out, in a balanced assessment of the case, Joe Biden was a private citizen in 2017 and there is no proof of illegality. But he was also planning to contest the presidency, which provokes questions of how he would relate to China, were he to become president. Even CNN conceded in 2018 that CEFC was “hard to distinguish” from the Chinese government. CEFC’s former head was arrested for corruption in 2018 and has not been seen since. These are murky waters for an American presidential candidate to paddle in.

Why, Democrats will ask angrily, would anyone even consider the alleged emails seriously? For one overriding reason: Biden has never denounced them as false. He could have done so at any time, but his failure to do so suggests to many people that he has been dissuaded by the ingenuity of computer technology which possesses the capacity eventually to verify or discredit them.

There may also be conflicting currents within the Biden camp encouraging a minimalist response. Joe Biden was never the candidate of choice for the leftist, “woke”, feminist, Californian wing of the Democratic Party; but those elements acquiesced in his candidature as the “respectable” figure that could win them the White House. But, having acted as Trojan Horse for the radicals’ preferred candidate, Kamala Harris, if a still smouldering scandal, possibly fanned by Republicans retaining the Senate, were to bring down Biden and enthrone President Harris, that would suit the woke brigade perfectly.

There is another possible factor in play. The outrageous “lids” placed on Biden by his campaign so close to the election, to keep him under wraps as much as possible, may not only be a means of avoiding questions about the alleged emails, but be designed to conceal his mental state. On one recent outing his incoherence fuelled suggestions of early dementia. So long as Biden can maintain a reasonable profile until polling day, the Democratic left will not repine if he crumbles on 4 November.

The great hazard for Americans in this election is: vote Biden, get Harris. A presidential term devoted to turning the United States into one vast San Francisco would not only sink America, but global geopolitical stability. If ever there was an instance of clear and present danger, this is it.