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Did ‘Project Censored’ Censor Hunter Biden Laptop Story?

It says something about the state of affairs of the U.S. media when even Project Censored appears to have censored the Hunter Biden laptop story.

Project Censored is a media research group founded in 1976 at Sonoma State University in California that produces an annual list of 25 stories that were ignored or covered up by the media in the past year.

Project Censored’s 2020 list omits perhaps the most egregious instance of media censorship in modern history – the media’s blatant pre-election censorship of the discovery of Hunter Biden’s laptop at a computer repair shop in Oct. 2019.

The laptop contains emails and information that show Biden’s family, including his father, the GOP candidate for president, may have engaged in foreign influence peddling when Biden was vice-president.

Project Censored Director Mickey Huff agreed in an email Tuesday that the Hunter Biden laptop story was censored but denied the Project has engaged in censoring. He said the Project’s list was compiled in March, prior to the discovery of the laptop, and the book was published in December. He said the laptop story will be considered for next year’s book.

“[W]e can’t cover what did not happen yet lol,” he wrote.

However, a search Tuesday morning of “Hunter Biden” on the Project’s web site produced only one article written on Nov. 25, 2019. It makes no claim of censorship. It fleetingly refers to the Democratic Party’s disregard of the activities of Joe Biden and his son, Hunter, in Ukraine during the Obama administration.

NPR Uses Circular Reasoning To Justify Censorship

What is the public record?

National Public Radio (NPR) reporter David Folkenflik tweeted Thursday morning: “If you’re in the news business, it’s malpractice to carry Giuliani’s press conference live at length without any cut ins to note the myriad ways the public record contradicts him.”

Folkenflik, who is NPR’s media correspondent, was referring to a press conference to be held later Thursday by President Donald Trump’s legal team, where Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani and others set forth allegations of fraud in the election. Folkenflik, who claims to be an expert, argues that journalism ethics require the media to interrupt the press conference at will to correct Trump’s legal team.

Folkenflik’s reasoning is commonly known as circular reasoning.

He adopts the premise that the public record is correct and therefore Trump’s legal team is incorrect to the extent that its arguments conflict with the public record. It flows from this that Trump’s claim the election was stolen must be false because the public record shows that Republican Joe Biden won.

Affidavit = Evidence

At the press conference, Trump’s legal team outlined its strategy to challenge the public record.

Giuliani pointed to a centralized pattern of voter fraud that focused on big cities controlled by Democrats, and especially those with a long history of corruption.

“What do we have to do to get you to give the American people the truth,” asked Giuliani. “This is real. It is not made up.”

NPR’s Diversity Problem: Why So Few Women Sources?

The high-tech industry in Silicon Valley isn’t the only American industry with serious diversity problems.

National Public Radio this week reported that male sources outnumber female sources on the network’s two largest weekday newsmagazines by two-to-one. Sources include on-air personalities and subject matter experts, Only about 30 percent of all sources on Morning Edition and All Things Considered were female in the fiscal year ending Sept. 30, 2015. There has been no improvement for the past three years.

Women, who comprise 50.45 percent of the U.S. population, are under-represented along all racial classes.

Here are the percentage of male/female sources broken down by race:

Asian : Males, 76%; Females 24%.
Whites: Males, 70%; Females 30%.
Latino: Males, 71%; Females 29%.
Blacks: Males 62%; Females 39%.

Women and Latinos are severely under-represented as NPR sources.

The percentage of NPR sources who are Latino remained flat at six percent for each of the three years. The U.S. Census Bureau reports that Latinos make up 17.4 percent of the U.S. population.

Here is the breakdown of sources by race from the NPR report:

There was a decline in the overall percentage of white sources, from 80 percent in 2013 to 73 percent in 2015. Whites make up 77.4 percent of the U.S. population in 2014.
African-American voices rose from 5 percent in 2013 to 11 percent in 2015. African-Americans comprise 13.2 percent of the U.S. population.
The share of Asian sources rose to eight percent in 2015, compared to five percent in 2013. Asians comprise 5.4 percent of the U.S. population.

Asians as a group are actually over-represented but Asian women lag the farthest behind in any racial group.

Of course, the U.S. population is not the same as NPR’s listener-ship. NPR listeners are 85 percent white, eight percent Latino and seven percent black.

Keith Woods, NPR’s vice president for diversity in news and operations, is quoted as stating he is “generally pleased with the direction that this is going,” noting the increases in the share of black on-air sources, as well as the percentage of “subject matter experts” who are people of color. He said he had “hoped for better news on our coverage of women, on our inclusion of women.”

Note: Two protected classes were not surveyed by NPR, age and disability.