On balance, NPR doesn’t have any

Liberals are upset that Donald Trump has defunded NPR, but it functioned as the propaganda arm of the Democratic Party

Liberals like to accuse Donald Trump of pushing some nutty conspiracy theories. But has anyone ever promoted anything nuttier than the theory that Hunter Biden’s laptop was not Hunter Biden’s laptop.

The theory, which was endorsed by National Public Radio among others, was that the Russians had somehow managed to load the laptop with photos and emails of Hunter doing crack and cavorting with loose women.

That would have required those evil Russkies to get possession of the laptop and pack it with false information before dropping it off at a computer repair shop in Delaware, the owner of which forwarded it to the proper authorities – who promptly deep-sixed it for almost a year and didn’t confirm it until a week from the election.

That was as crazy a conspiracy theory as you could imagine. But just about everyone in the mainstream media bought it.

The worst were the folks at National Public Radio, who made the literally incredible argument that the story wasn’t a story.

“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,” NPR Managing Editor for News Terence Samuel said at the time.

Distraction from what? The media effort to throw the election to Joe Biden?

If that news had broken a few months earlier and been thoroughly reported, the tales of debauchery and nepotism could have derailed Biden’s candidacy.

So it’s no wonder that Donald Trump has cut off federal funding for public media.

It’s a wonder he didn’t cut it off in his first term.

But the Donald was busy back then. His victory in 2016 seemed to come as a surprise even to him. And even before he was seated, the media were pushing another conspiracy theory to try and unseat him.

That was the idea that those evil Russkies had tried to alter the election results by running ads on the internet.

But the $160,000 they spent on internet ads represents a few pennies in proportion to the billions that go into a modern campaign.

In a desperate effort to defend their efforts, NPR said the Russians “also reached out to politically active Americans, posing as like-minded supporters, and helped organize rallies and other events in the real world.”

Organized rallies? I covered lots of Trump’s rallies.

No one organized them. They were pure chaos.

His people didn’t even collect email addresses of his supporters.

This time around it’s different. Trump’s getting revenge on those who opposed him.

This has set off the usual wave of whining among the liberals. But they started this fight. And at the moment they’re getting their butts kicked.

The NPR issue is perhaps the most telling. For as long as I’ve been in the news business, which is 50 years, National Public Radio has been the public-relations arm of the Democratic Party.

I’ve never seen any effort to achieve balanced coverage.

I recall once discussing this with a public-radio executive.

I suggested that, since the American public is roughly split between liberals and conservatives, the same should be true of public-radio coverage.

He’d never thought of that, he confessed. He granted that it seemed like a novel idea. But public radio remains under the control of left-wingers.

That goes for the mainstream media as well – or what’s left of it.

Not much, compared to the golden days of late-night comedy. Back then, hosts like Johnny Carson and Jay Leno could get through an entire show without mentioning the president. Good ratings were practically guaranteed.

Now the audience is fractured. A laptop like the one Hunter had could get news and entertainment from dozens of sources.

Why should one of those sources have government funding - either from Washington or from Moscow?

THE REAL STORY OF THE LAPTOP:

Here’s a column I did in which I interviewed former CIA agent Larry Johnson, a frequent source of mine, concerning the laptop.

Larry is a former CIA agent who just happens to be friends with the father of the laptop repairman central to this story.

Here’s my assessment of my fellow members of the MSM and their abysmal performance. After writing that you had to go to the English papers to get a fair account of the matter, I wrote

I can’t say the same for my fellow members of the mainstream media here in America. When the contents of that infamous laptop were revealed they were handed a father-son drama right out of Shakespeare. And they haven’t even followed up an obvious lead on the story’s veracity.