Tony Bobulinski Speaks

Tucker Carlson is the most-watched show in cable news. His viewership exceeds 1 million people in the prime advertiser demo. The rest of the media hurls invective his way because of jealousy.

Last night, he got a long interview with Tony Bobulinski relating to the Hunter Biden story.

This matters for a few reasons you should appreciate and there is one very serious danger in this story.

First, the story matters most to Republicans who already hate Biden. After four years of withering media attacks against the Trump family, the Trump fans get to say Biden is just as bad if not worse. The media that claims Trump is in Russia’s pocket now have a story that Biden is in China’s pocket. It neutralizes an attack on Trump.

It is kind of funny that the President was impeached, in part, over trying to pressure Ukraine to dig up dirt on the Bidens and now that dirt is being dug up and it involves China too. I’m kinda surprised the media and Democrats haven’t tried to spin it that way, but to do that they’d have to talk about the story. That gets me to my second point.

The story matters because of the way the media is handling it. Most voters are never going to know the details or nuance of the story. What they are going to realize is just how much major media outlets are running interference for Joe Biden.

Just consider this tweet from Oliver Darcy at CNN.

Oliver Darcy @oliverdarcy

Here's @BretBaier justifying Fox taking Trump's rallies live, by noting the channel also took Obama and Biden live as well. It's classic bothsidesism. Trump uses air time to brazenly lie and spread misinfo, including about the coronavirus. Obama and Biden do not.

I like Oliver, but I think it is a really terrible precedent for a reporter to suggest covering one group of lying politicians is acceptable but covering another politician, who happens to be the sitting President of the United States, is unacceptable because he lies more. And we need to be honest — Obama and Biden, as politicians, lie too, even if not at the same level. Remember “if you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor”? Remember Biden saying Republicans would put black people back in chains?

The American media has become one of the least self-reflective institutions in America and has ultimately undermined its own credibility. The President of the United States can refer to the media as the “enemy of the people” because they think Americans should be restricted from watching the sitting President live on television and also because they refuse to cover stories about his opponent.

Someone at the Washington Post actually wrote the story needed to be treated as Russian disinformation even if it was not. These are the same people who ran with multiple discredited stories sourced from the Steele Dossier, including the bogus story that Michael Cohen went to Prague.

The Hunter Biden story and Bobulinski play into a growing fear Americans have across partisan lines that the press is no longer an objective conveyor of facts and information, but an active participant in a political process choosing to pick winners and losers, which inevitably are on the left.

No one is going to understand this story in a week. But Americans will understand the story is being ignored by major media outlets because it might hurt Joe Biden. That will raise doubts about Joe Biden. It’s not that the media ran stories discrediting it. The media and tech giants chose to flat out ignore the story and block access to the story and then brag about their gatekeeper role in so doing.

But there is a very real danger in the Hunter Biden story too.

It broke two weeks ago from the election and picked up steam with the Tucker Carlson story seven days before the election. It takes Republicans off message.

Donald Trump isn’t going to win a purity contest with Joe Biden. The man is on his third wife, had affairs with porn stars, and tried to steer a summit of world leaders to his own golf course until there was a public backlash. He can drag Biden’s family to his level, but he isn’t going to be able to get Biden impugned worse than how the press has treated Trump’s family.

But Trump beats Biden in every poll ever taken on who is best able to grow the economy and create jobs. Every moment the President and his surrogates and supporters are talking about Hunter Biden, they aren’t talking about Joe Biden directly without explanation and they are not talking about jobs and the economy.

If anything, this gives the GOP a story to carry into a Biden Administration like White Water, but now without an appropriate special counsel law. It gives the GOP the opportunity for show trial style hearings on Capitol Hill if they keep the Senate. But it makes it less likely they keep the Senate because it distracts them from their core message.

If the story came out a month ago, maybe it would have been timed better. Two weeks before Election Day and this story just throws the GOP off message.

All that said, I offer one caveat — in a close election where states might be won by tens of thousands of votes, maybe it will raise enough doubts to persuade just enough people. The problem, though, is the high number of early votes that were cast before the story even came out.

We will find out in six days.