Author, historian, comical point-misser
Anne Appelbaum doesn't understand the real issue with Hunter Biden's laptop.
On the more-addictive-than-meth website TV Tropes, there’s an entry for “comically missing the point,” where a character in a movie or television show interprets something in a completely inexplicable way. Usually, it’s the lovably dumb or naive character who’s the butt of the joke.
Anne Applebaum, author of several acclaimed books on the Soviet Union and its domination of Eastern Europe, and an insightful commentator on the rise of authoritarianism in America and beyond, is neither dumb nor naive. And that’s what made this so jarring:
Journalist and author Anne Applebaum dismissed a question Wednesday about the influence Hunter Biden’s laptop could have had on the outcome of the 2020 election, stating that it is “totally irrelevant” and that she personally is not interested in it.
At the University of Chicago’s Disinformation and the Erosion of Democracy conference on Wednesday, Applebaum was asked about suppression of the story by most of the media prior to the 2020 election.
David Axelrod sat across from Applebaum, and he called on University of Chicago Student Daniel Schmidt during a Q&A. Schmidt is also the editor of the school’s student newspaper.
Schmidt reminded Applebaum that in an Oct. 23, 2020 piece for the Atlantic, she wrote off the potentially damning scandal.
“Those who live outside the Fox News bubble and intend to remain there do not, of course, need to learn any of this stuff,” Applebaum wrote.
Schmidt recited her quote, and asked Applebaum if the she and others acted prematurely in dismissing the laptop scandal.
[…]
Applebaum dug in. She responded to the question by stating she did not find it “interesting” that a laptop containing alleged illegal activities by the president’s son’s was abandoned.
“My problem with Hunter Biden’s laptop is I think it’s totally irrelevant,” she said. “I mean, it’s not whether it’s disinformation… I didn’t think Hunter Biden’s business relationships have anything to do with who should be President of the United States.
“I don’t find it to be interesting, I mean, that would be my problem with that as a major news story.”
The thing is, I don’t find the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop particularly interesting, either. You mean the wastrel child of a prominent politician might have parlayed his family name into wealth and partied like an eighties hair-metal drummer? Fetch the smelling salts!
There is nothing new about Presidential candidates’ family members being colossal screwups. What was new in 2020 was so many media outlets and social media platforms not just deciding it isn’t newsworthy, but that it’s so dubious you shouldn’t be allowed to read about it.
The Bush twins’ teenage exploits were a tabloid staple in the oughts. Jimmy Carter’s brother was so infamous for his drunken antics, he even got a short-lived beer out of it.
Even now, the same news organisations that bent over backwards to spike the Hunter Biden story were perfectly fine with making news stories out of social media posts by the teenage children of Kellyanne Conway and Ted Cruz. Why, it’s almost like there might be a double standard at work here.
Had the Hunter Biden story just run it’s course, I doubt it would have swung the election. The laptop could have proven Joe Biden was the Zodiac killer and it still wouldn’t have come close to what the Trump crime family has been up to.
But this isn’t about whatever Hunter Biden was doing. It’s about whether respected news sources will actually cover the news fairly or try to push a party line. (Either that, or just give up any pretence of “impartiality” and own their partisan leanings, as with many British newspapers, which are mostly more readable than American ones.)
I still think Appelbaum is a great writer, but her answer to this question reeked of Pauline Kael refusing to believe Nixon was elected because she didn’t know anyone who voted for him. That story is fake news, but the media bubbles in which we’re living are all too real.
You are exactly right. Every word. It's disheartening to think that one of these days the heretofore merely somewhat trustworthy media (and I emphasize somewhat) operating outside the Fox News misinformation / outright lies / fear & hate-mongering-for-profit business model will one day (probably sooner rather than later) wake up to the fact that there's more money in that than in simply ignoring the stories and facts that don't fit or promote their preferred narrative. And being the good capitalists that they are, when that light bulb finally starts to glow, the old saw about "No news is good news" will be orders of magnitude truer than ever.