VICTOR JOECKS: Three scandals the media glossed over

Media bias is often most clearly evident in what is downplayed and ignored. Consider the past week.

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg recently went on Joe Rogan’s podcast. Rogan asked about Facebook’s decision to limit distribution of the New York Post’s bombshell story about Hunter Biden’s laptop. That story broke in the weeks before the 2020 election, but social media companies tried to stop people from reading it. Much of the national mainstream media inaccurately dismissed it as Russian disinformation.

If that story had been widely reported, it could have cost Joe Biden the election. Documents and emails on the laptop suggested that Biden was very connected and even personally benefitting from his son’s shady business deals.

To justify Facebook suppressing the story, Zuckerberg cited a warning from the FBI.

“The background here is the FBI, I think, basically came to us … and was like, ‘Hey, just so you know, like, you should be on high alert. We thought that there was a lot of Russian propaganda in the 2016 election. We have it on notice that, basically, there’s about to be some kind of dump that’s similar to that. So just be vigilant,’ ” Zuckerberg said.

The sounds like a confession that a federal law enforcement agency fed misinformation to Facebook to help Biden politically. Months after Biden was elected, major outlets admitted the laptop emails are authentic.

Talk about election interference. That is an absolute scandal, but it has received scant attention.

That wouldn’t be the case if the situation were reversed. Let’s say the FBI went to Facebook in 2016 with a similar warning before the tape of Donald Trump making inappropriate comments came out — and then Facebook suppressed the story weeks before Trump’s victory. The outrage would never end.

Here’s another story you probably didn’t hear about. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene was swatted — twice last week. Swatting is when someone calls 911 and reports a fake shooting or emergency at someone else’s home. That’s incredibly dangerous as police can respond to those types of events with weapons drawn. The caller said he or she was upset about Greene’s view on transgender issues. Greene believes in biology.

Imagine if this had happened to Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez with the caller claiming to oppose her views on abortion. The story would dominate the news. The national mainstream media would hang the incident around the head of every Republican in the country. When it happens to Greene, there’s radio silence.

Last week, two people pleaded guilty to selling the diary of Ashley Biden, the president’s daughter. A relatively obscure site published what it claimed was the contents of her diary shortly before the 2020 election. It included writings that could put her father in a bad light.

Ashley Biden is a private citizen, so the desire to shield her from the public eye is understandable. But if a diary from Ivanka Trump turned up and included similar revelations, it would be a major scandal for her father.

These three stories all happened within a week. With the election two months away, expect the national media’s bias to become even more blatant.

Contact Victor Joecks at vjoecks@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-4698. Follow @victorjoecks on Twitter.