The public editor of National Public Radio said she was “really uncomfortable” with the “censorship” of big tech companies Post reporting on Hunter Biden laptop — but he gave his outlet free rein to refuse to cover the story.
Kelly McBride, who has been NPR’s ombudsman since 2020, told TheWrap those tech companies like x and facebook It was wrong to block users from sharing links to The Post’s revelations about a laptop whose hard drive contained emails Linking the Biden family to a Ukrainian businessman.
“I was really uncomfortable with it being censored by tech companies,” McBride said. “Who are they, the arbiters of truth?”
In April, Uri Berliner, who left NPR after publishing an essay critical of the outlet for its left-wing bias, explained his mistake. Former employer for ignoring laptop story.
Still, McBride, now a senior vice president at the Poynter Institute, told The Wrap he’s more troubled by how tech companies blocked people from reading the story than by how NPR covered it.
“I understand [the tech companies] Try to reduce the spread of information that is considered false or distorted. I got that,” McBride said.
“But in this case, I don’t think they had a proper process to determine whether this information was being distorted.”
At the time, NPR refused to even cover the laptop story. Terrence Samuels, who was NPR’s managing editor at the time, said that his outlet “didn’t want to waste our time on stories that aren’t really stories.”
McBride said that NPR could not adequately cover the laptop story because The Post “did not make the entire laptop available.” He also accused The Post of “shaming and shaming” Hunter Biden.
McBride said, “That’s not the kind of journalism NPR does and this is not the kind of story NPR’s audience is interested in.”
McBride also denied that NPR had a left-leaning bias that led it to refuse to cover the story.
“It wasn’t the political nature of it, it was the tabloid nature of it,” he claimed. “It was a tabloid story.”
McBride’s comments came on the fourth anniversary of The Post’s special report, which found that Hunter Biden introduced his father, then Vice President Joe Bidento a Top executive at a Ukrainian energy firm.
The introduction came less than a year after Joe Biden pressured Ukrainian government officials to fire a prosecutor The company is investigatingBurisma, which was paying Hunter Biden up to $50,000 a month to take the board position.
The Post’s coverage was based on a laptop that was left at a Delaware repair shop and was never retrieved. The computer was turned over to the FBI by the store owner and a copy of the hard drive was obtained by former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who was acting as an attorney for then-President Donald Trump at the time.
Several former intelligence officials condemned the laptop as “Russian propaganda”, but forensic analysis showed that the laptop’s contents were authentic.
But X, as Twitter was known at the time, and Facebook blocked their users from sharing links, The Post reports.
Social media companies said they censored the story due to concerns that the content was obtained through hacking.
Other News organizations also refused to report What he said on the laptop raised doubts about its authenticity.
Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, who was the company’s CEO at the time, later expressed regret for not allowing users to share story links.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg told podcaster Joe Rogan in 2022 that Facebook limited distribution of the story in response to an FBI warning about possible foreign interference ahead of the 2020 presidential election.
