In October, news broke that Hunter Biden had dropped a computer off at a repair store and never picked it up again.  The contents were so disturbing that the store owner tried to get the FBI interested.  When the FBI dropped the issue, the store-owner went public.  The left, with National Public Radio (NPR) taking the lead, immediately announced that the computer was probably a Russian fake.  Now, though, with Hunter admitting that it could well be his computer, NPR is 'fessing up that its reporting was wrong.

We covered the Hunter Biden computer story pretty extensively here at American Thinker (see, e.g, this post).  Hunter, a man with a long history of serious substance abuse, dropped the computer off at a Delaware repair shop.  When he didn't return, the store-owner checked out what was on the computer and discovered reams of material about Biden family affairs, including foreign financial dealings with Burisma in Ukraine and with an energy business in China.

The computer also contained lots of photographs and videos.  The ones that attracted people's attention showed Biden engaged in sexual activities with a variety of women, some of whom looked quite young.  There were also pictures of a narcissistic Hunter admiring his own, uh, "equipment" as well as at least one photo of a grocked-out Hunter with a crack pipe falling from his lips.

In a normal era, the story would have been a huge October surprise: candidate's crack addict son's computer reveals that candidate was using (and quite possibly) abusing his office to enrich his family.  Son so compromised that father, if he were elected, would be subject to blackmail.  That kind of stuff.

However, the media announced that the story was fake.  The tech tyrants used that narrative as the justification to delete from social media any attempts to share the story.

After the election, it turned out that the story was kept so secret that many ordinary Americans — unlike political obsessives — knew nothing about it.  A poll showed that one out of six people who voted for Biden would not have done so if they'd been aware of the computer and its contents.  Considering that Biden allegedly received over 81,000,000 votes, that means as many as 13,500,000 people would either have voted for Trump or withheld their votes from Biden.  Either way, no matter what Democrats did, they wouldn't have been able to pretend Biden won.

One of the leaders in the charge claiming that the computer was a Russian plant was NPR (which you, dear taxpayer, help pay for).  In October, NPR refused to cover the story.  As a contemporaneous Mediaite story reported:

NPR Public Editor Kelly McBride responded to a listener who asked: "why NPR has apparently not reported on the Joe Biden, Hunter Biden story in the last week or so that Joe did know about Hunter's business connections in Europe that Joe had previously denied having knowledge?"

After claiming that "red flags" abounded, McBride got to the real issue:

McBride then explains the biggest reason listeners haven't heard much on NPR about the Post story is that "the assertions don't amount to much." NPR Managing Editor Terrence Samuel said, "We don't want to waste our time on stories that are not really stories, and we don't want to waste the listeners' and readers' time on stories that are just pure distractions. And quite frankly, that's where we ended up, this was … a politically driven event and we decided to treat it that way."

What turns out to have been politically driven was NPR's silence.  In a review of Biden's recently published book about his sleazy life, NPR's Ron Elving first stated that "[t]he laptop story was discredited by US intelligence and independent investigations by news organizations."  On April 1, a correction suddenly appeared: "A previous version of this story said U.S. intelligence had discredited the laptop story. U.S. intelligence officials have not made a statement to that effect."

So what changed?  Probably the fact that Hunter Biden admitted that the laptop "certainly" could have been his.  The subtext is that he was so drugged out he has no idea what happened to his laptop.

There is nothing good to be said about the fact that the election resulted in Biden entering the White House.  But it feels like another dagger in the heart to see NPR cavalierly admit that it made a massive error in reporting a major news item.  There's no remorse here.  NPR can make this admission because it knows it doesn't matter.  Its disgraceful behavior worked.

Image: Hunter Biden crack pipe photo.  Public Domain.

You can find the MeWe post for this article here.