National Public Radio’s public editor said she was “really uncomfortable” with large tech companies “censoring” The Post’s reporting on the Hunter Biden laptop — but gave her own outlet a free pass for declining to cover the story.
Kelly McBride, who has been NPR’s ombudsman since 2020, told The Wrap that tech firms such as X and Facebook were wrong to prevent users from sharing links to The Post’s revelations about the laptop, whose hard drive included emails linking the Biden family to a Ukrainian businessman.
“I was really uncomfortable with the tech companies censoring it,” McBride said. “Who are they to be the arbiters of truth?”
In April, Uri Berliner, who left NPR after publishing an essay critical of the outlet for its left-wing bias, faulted his former employer for ignoring the laptop story.
Nevertheless, McBride, who is now senior vice president at Poynter Institute, told The Wrap that she is more troubled with how tech companies blocked people from reading the story than she is about how NPR covered it.
“I understand [the tech companies] try to dial down the spread of information that has been determined to be untrue or distorted. I get that,” McBride said.
“But in this case, I don’t think they had the due process in place to determine if this information was being distorted.”
At the time, NPR also declined to cover the laptop story. Terence Samuels, who was NPR’s managing editor at the time, said his outlet didn’t “want to waste our time on stories that are not really stories.”
McBride said that NPR couldn’t adequately cover the laptop story because The Post “didn’t make the entire laptop available.” She also accused The Post of “shaming and humiliating” Hunter Biden.
“That’s not the kind of journalism NPR does and it’s not the kind of story that NPR’s audience is interested in,” McBride said.
McBride also denied that NPR’s left-leaning bent was why it declined to cover the story.
“It wasn’t the political nature of it, it was the tabloid nature of it,” she claimed. “It was a tabloid story.”
McBride’s comments were published on the fourth anniversary of The Post’s exclusive report, which found that Hunter Biden introduced his father, then-Vice President Joe Biden, to a top executive at a Ukrainian energy firm.
The introduction was made less than a year before Joe Biden pressured Ukrainian government officials into firing a prosecutor who was investigating the company, Burisma, which was paying Hunter Biden up to $50,000 per month for taking up a board position.
The Post’s coverage was based on a laptop that was left at a Delaware repair shop and never reclaimed. The computer was handed over to the FBI by the shop’s owner and a copy of the hard drive was obtained by Rudy Giuliani, the former New York City mayor who at the time was acting as then-President Donald Trump’s lawyer.
Scores of former intelligence officials denounced the laptop as “Russian disinformation” but forensic analysis found that the contents of the laptop were authentic.
But X, which was known as Twitter at the time, and Facebook prevented their users from sharing links to The Post report.
The social media companies said that they censored the story due to concerns that the material was obtained through hacking.
Other news organizations also declined to report on the laptop due to what they said were doubts about its authenticity.
Jack Dorsey, the Twitter co-founder who was CEO of the company at the time, later expressed regret for not allowing users to share links to the story.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg told podcaster Joe Rogan in 2022 that Facebook limited distribution of the story in response to a warning from the FBI about potential foreign interference ahead of the 2020 presidential election.
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