The head of National Public Radio now admits that the taxpayer-funded media outlet was wrong to refuse to cover the Hunter Biden laptop story when it broke just weeks before the 2020 presidential election.
NPR CEO Katherine Maher testified Wednesday at a hearing held by the House Subcommittee on Delivering on Government Efficiency meant to address the left-wing bias displayed by publicly funded news outlets NPR and PBS.
“NPR acknowledges that we were mistaken in failing to cover the Hunter Biden laptop story more aggressively and sooner,” Maher said in response to a question from Representative Michael Cloud (R., Texas).
Maher, who joined NPR as CEO in January of last, year has a long history of left-wing activism, which Republican lawmakers highlighted during the hearing. Members of the panel also cited former NPR editor Uri Berliner’s scathing editorial in the Free Press last year about how the outlet lost America’s trust and become overtly partisan. Berliner gave an inside account of NPR’s failure to adequately cover the Hunter Biden laptop and Covid-19 origins as the outlet became more overtly left-wing beginning in President Donald Trump’s first term.
When the New York Post first reported on Hunter Biden’s laptop hard drive ahead of the 2020 presidential election, NPR ignored it “because it could help Trump” and disregarded the facts at play, Berliner recalled.
“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’s then-managing editor Terence Samuels said in October 2020. Four years later, NPR’s public editor claimed it did not cover the laptop story because of its “tabloid nature” and belatedly expressed concerns about social media companies suppressing the Post’s reporting.
Cloud followed up his question about the laptop story by asking whether Maher believed the outlet had erred in dismissing the possibility that Covid emerged from a lab in Wuhan China, rather than from a wet market.
“We acknowledged that the new CIA evidence is worthy of coverage and have covered it,” Maher said.
The CIA announced in January that it has concluded with “low confidence” that the Covid virus originated in the Wuhan lab, a finding that tracks with the recently revealed conclusions of the German and British intelligence services.
The lab-leak theory, first elevated by independent journalists and scientists early on in the pandemic, was for years cast a xenophobic conspiracy theory by much of the mainstream press, including NPR.
Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, chair of the DOGE subcommittee, led the panel’s Republicans in pointing out NPR and PBS’s ideological bias on a range of issues such as gender ideology and diversity, equity, and inclusion.
“NPR and PBS have increasingly become radical, Left-wing echo chambers for a narrow audience of mostly wealthy, white, urban liberals and progressives, who generally look down on and judge rural America,” Greene said.
Conservatives have increasingly embraced the idea of stripping NPR and PBS of government funding because of their political bias. Both outlets receive the lion’s share of their funding from outside sources, with just 1 percent of NPR’s funds coming from the government.
Facebook and Twitter censored the laptop story after an extensive pressure campaign from the FBI and other agencies leading up to it. A discredited letter from 51 former intelligence officials claiming the laptop story resembled Russian disinformation also prompted mainstream news outlets to dismiss the Hunter Biden laptop in the final days of the 2020 presidential campaign.
The Post reported on emails from Hunter Biden’s laptop archive showing how he leveraged his father to woo business associates during his foreign business trips beginning when Joe Biden was vice president. The House GOP investigated Hunter Biden’s business enterprise for its impeachment inquiry into then-President Joe Biden and found $27 million of payments from foreign sources to the younger Biden and his business partners. The payments came primarily from Ukraine, China, and Romania during and after Joe Biden’s vice presidency.
Special counsel David Weiss prosecuted Hunter Biden on federal tax and gun charges last year as the impeachment inquiry was ongoing. In June, Hunter Biden was convicted on three gun charges for buying a firearm while he was addicted to crack cocaine and lying about his drug use on gun paperwork. Three months later, Biden plead guilty to nine federal tax charges stemming from his failure to pay $1.4 million of taxes in a timely manner last decade, avoiding what would have been a bruising trial.
At the gun trial, the Justice Department presented the physical copy of Biden’s computer and had FBI special agent Erica Jensen testify about how the bureau verified the laptop in late 2019. Jensen said the FBI obtained a copy of Biden’s laptop data and authenticated it by cross referencing the device’s serial number with Biden’s iCloud storage accounts.
Her testimony was practically the same as IRS whistleblower Gary Shapley’s account of how federal agents authenticated Biden’s computer data during their investigation into his overdue taxes. Shapley and IRS whistleblower Joseph Ziegler came forward in spring 2023 with detailed allegations of misconduct from IRS and DOJ officials during the long-running probe into Hunter Biden’s taxes. The Trump administration recently promoted the career IRS agents to senior advisor roles after the pair faced retaliation from the agency.
Joe Biden pardoned his son in December before he could be sentenced on the gun and tax charges. The pardon covered all potential criminal activity from January 2014 to December 2024, making it one of the most sweeping in American history.