"The notion that a laptop delivered to the
Post by Rudy Giuliani two weeks before the election and rejected by the
New York Times, the
Wall Street Journal, Fox News
, and others should
not have been treated skeptically is the dicier proposition. Further, the hyperventilating about the assault this represents on the First Amendment is risible. Twitter, a private company, was free to ignore Biden’s request. Even if Biden had been president at the time, there would be no violation of the First Amendment. Government officials not infrequently request that journalists refrain from publishing material, often about military
secrets. Newspapers sometimes comply and sometimes not. It’s only a violation of the First Amendment if the government coerces the journalists.
Nor did Twitter’s temporary suspension of the
Post’s account sway the election, as the hysterical
tweets from the likes of Rep. Jim Banks suggest (“Never forget that 79% say truthful coverage of Hunter Biden’s laptop would have changed outcome [sic] of 2020 election”). As Cathy Young
notes, 1) the ban lasted only about a day; 2) the ban may have heightened interest in the story rather than suppressing it and in any case the story was available via a Google search; and 3) the whole narrative about Biden’s participation in Ukrainian corruption, the gravamen of the laptop story, is false. It rests on the debunked theory that Biden sought to have a Ukrainian prosecutor fired for investigating Burisma, but the truth is that the prosecutor was
not investigating, and that’s one reason Biden pushed for his removal."
Mona Charen, The Bulwark
nypost.com
