Four years ago today, Twitter and Facebook blocked users from reading The New York Post’s reporting on Hunter Biden, the son of then-presidential nominee Joe Biden. NPR public editor Kelly McBride, in a recent conversation with TheWrap, said she wasn’t a fan of Big Tech telling Americans what they could and couldn’t read in the weeks leading up to an election.
“I was really uncomfortable with the tech companies censoring it,” McBride said. “Who are they to be the arbiters of truth?”
If you need a refresher, the Post on Oct. 14, 2020, published a story saying Hunter “introduced his father, then-Vice President Joe Biden, to a top executive at a Ukrainian energy firm less than a year before the elder Biden pressured government official in Ukraine into firing a prosecutor who was investigating the company.”
The Post’s coverage, based on a laptop provided by Rudy Giuliani, also included pictures of the younger Biden with drug paraphernalia.
Twitter (now X) blocked users from sharing links to the story soon after it was published, saying it violated the company’s policy against “hacked materials.” The company, then run by Jack Dorsey, also locked The Post’s Twitter account. Facebook similarly took steps towards “reducing its distribution” on its platform.
Looking back on that moment in time four years later, McBride said she has a bigger issue with the story being blocked than with 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.”
McBride, who also serves as a senior vice president at The Poynter Institute, was named NPR’s public editor in April 2020.
The outlet was criticized by many for failing to tackle the Biden laptop story in the weeks heading into the 2020 election. Then-NPR managing editor Terence Samuels, in a statement that came a week after the Post’s coverage was censored, said his outlet didn’t “want to waste our time on stories that are not really stories.”
McBride, in her conversation with TheWrap, said NPR caught too much heat for not running stories based on the Post’s reporting. NPR, she noted, didn’t have much to work with “because the New York Post didn’t make the entire laptop available.” The publicly funded outlet at that point, she said, was left to decide between recycling the Post’s story or not covering it until its own reporters had new details to share.
“If you look at the stories the Post was doing at the time, they were more focused on shaming and humiliating Hunter Biden than they were on any sort of accountability — and that’s not an NPR story,” McBride explained. “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 also pushed back on the idea that the Post being a right-leaning outlet and NPR leaning left had anything to do with NPR’s lack of coverage.
“It wasn’t the political nature of it, it was the tabloid nature of it,” she said. “It was a tabloid story.”
In terms of regrets, McBride admitted the only thing NPR could have done better regarding the Biden laptop was in how it approached the story in the months after it broke. The response to its lack of coverage in October 2020, she said, led to NPR being “really gun-shy” in how it tackled the story moving forward — something she said wasn’t ideal.
Earlier this year, Hunter Biden was found guilty on three federal gun charges. The contents of his laptop — which were censored by Twitter and Facebook in 2020 — played a “visible role” in the prosecution’s case, according to The New York Times.
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