Brian Stelter defends 2020 media coverage of Hunter Biden laptop story: We never labeled it 'disinformation'

Former CNN host Brian Stelter defended the media's coverage of the Hunter Biden laptop story that was suppressed in the final weeks of the 2020 presidential election.

Appearing on Friday's installment of the Fourth Watch podcast, Stelter filled in as guest host as he interviewed Fourth Watch media critic Steve Krakauer, the podcast's actual host and author of the new book "Uncovered: How the Media Got Cozy With Power, Abandoned Its Principles, and Lost the People."

The discussion largely focused on the current state of the media and the distrust it has fueled in recent years. As an example of when the media messed up, Krakauer pointed to the lack of coverage news organizations gave the New York Post's bombshell reporting about Hunter Biden, which he noted was famously suppressed by Twitter at the time.

Krakauer surmised that the media was largely hesitant to put a spotlight on the laptop because of the "scars" from 2016 when so much coverage was dedicated to Hillary Clinton's email scandal, which played a major role in her ultimate defeat against Donald Trump.

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"It's one thing to try to tiptoe into the story and it's another to treat it as if it's this toxic material that completely spins the public in a really wrong direction," Krakauer said.

Stelter conceded that if Twitter "screwed up" in censoring the laptop story, "we should go after Twitter." But he offered a full-throated defense on how CNN and other media organizations handled the Biden scandal at the time.

"I think newsrooms just looked around and said, 'We don't have the laptop. We don't have evidence. We don't have evidence it's real. And we know that there are reasons to wonder if it's disinformation,'" Stelter said. 

"A lot of the lies that happen now about what happened in 2020 go like this - they say, 'All these a--h---s, they all called it a disinformation!' That's not true," Stelter continued. "A lot of us just wondered, we said out loud, ‘could this be?’ We said things like ‘some former US officials think it might be,' it was always cushioned - it was not always, it was often cushioned that way. And now in retrospect, two years later, three years later, people like partisans like to pretend that it was labeled disinformation, which it wasn't. There was concern. There was reason to be concerned not because of the Hillary emails, but because of the Russian attempt in 2016." 

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Krakauer pushed back, citing the infamous letter from former intel officials who claimed the Hunter Biden emails shared by the Post had the "classic earmarks of a Russian information operation," something he stressed was "essentially" telling Americans that it was disinformation. He also called out the double standard the media had with its approach to the Russia investigation and how one anonymously-sourced story about the Mueller probe from The New York Times or The Washington Post would fuel "an entire news cycle" but not the New York Post's Hunter Biden story. 

The former "Reliable Sources" host attempted to separate the comparison, claiming there were "a lot of problems" regarding the various circumstances behind the New York Post's reporting and the "Uncovered" author acknowledged there were some "red flags." 

What was left unmentioned in the exchange between Stelter and Krakauer was the fact that CNN's top brass was caught spiking the laptop story in leaked recordings of the network's editorial calls shortly after the New York Post first published its bombshell reporting. 

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News organizations including CNN, Politico, The New York Times, The Washington Post, NBC News and CBS News verified the authenticity of Hunter Biden's laptop long after his father Joe Biden won the presidency. 

At the time, Stelter himself heavily suggested to his CNN audience that the controversy was a fake scandal being pushed by the far right. 

"There's a lot about this story that does not add up," Stelter told his viewers in October 2020. "And, I mean, for all we know, these emails were made up, or maybe some are real and some are fakes, we don't know. But we do know that this is a classic example of the right-wing media machine."

Nearly two years later, Stelter completely flip-flopped.

"Hunter under federal investigation, charges can be coming at any time, this is not just a right-wing media story. This is a real problem for the Bidens," Stelter told a guest in August 2022.  

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Incidentally, it was one of Stelter's final broadcasts as he was fired by new CNN boss Chris Licht days later and "Reliable Sources" was canceled. 

CNN has undergone significant personnel changes under Licht. In addition to Stelter, other high-profile dismissals included CNN's chief legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin, White House correspondent John Harwood and editor-at-large Chris Cillizza.