When Trump raised the issue at the debate, Joe Biden responded by saying the claim was "Totally discredited. Totally discredited." Given that it's a direct allegation in a government document and Biden is flatly denying it, you'd think this would be a perfect opportunity for the media to dig in and sort out the truth of the claim.
According to PolitiFact, which refused to rate the claim either true or false, the facts are in dispute because "Biden's lawyer says he did not co-found the partnership and had no stake in it," and "Democrats say they reviewed the Republicans' documentation but did not find a specific link to Hunter Biden."
A lengthy New Yorker profile of Hunter Biden from last year, which clearly had extensive cooperation from the Biden team, reported the following: "In June, 2009, five months after Joe Biden became Vice-President, Hunter co-founded a second company, Rosemont Seneca Partners, with Christopher Heinz, Senator John Kerry's stepson." That was 15 months ago.
For Joe Biden to tell the American people this accusation is "Totally discredited," when the media hadn't even touched the story, well, honest fact-checkers would tell it like it is: Joe Biden stood up in front of tens of millions of Americans on Tuesday night and told a self-serving lie - a lie that would have been called a four-alarm trouser conflagration if Trump had said it.
Naturally, there are consequences for the decision not to report major news such as the Hunter Biden story until you are forced to.
There's a case to be made that the blizzard of media coverage has vastly overstated the influence of QAnon, but it's caused enough real-world problems that the media are understandably baying for relevant Republicans and conservative activists to make it clear this lunacy is "Totally discredited," in the literal, as opposed to Joe Biden meaning of the phrase.
The Hunter Biden story is practically the new normal in terms of how it illustrates media willingness to suppress or ignore inconvenient truths.
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