In a recent video podcast, journalist Michael Shellenberger described "weird behavior" by top reporters from The Washington Post and The New York Times who met with social media executives in 2020 to discuss how to bury a potential story about Hunter Biden and his dealings in Ukraine.
"When you imagine journalists get together and talk about how NOT to cover an issue – or how to kind of squelch an issue – [the result was that] by the time the Hunter Biden laptop [story] came out, they had all been mentally programmed to view it as misinformation," Shellenberger states.
Specifically, according to the journalist, national security reporters from those two major newspapers met with executives at Facebook and Twitter in charge of content to discuss how they would bury a potential breaking news story about Joe Biden's son that might reflect badly on the elder Biden.
Shellenberger uncovered the plot in a recent installation of the Twitter Files. He explained that the liberal Aspen Institute convened something akin to a workshop.
"… They [called it] a table-top exercise … that included the heads of trust and safety at Facebook and Twitter, the top national security journalists at The New York Times and The Washington Post, [to discuss] about how to not cover a Russian leak of information related to Hunter Biden," he described.
According to Shellenberger, the Aspen Institute is supported by the government – and that possibly a three-letter-agency was behind the whole thing … which would have made it illegal.
"It was the creepiest thing I'd ever seen. I was kind of like, boy, if that was being really run by FBI, that's election interference – and interference in the operations of a journalist organization," he shared.
Shellenberger also admitted he isn't surprised the NY Times and WaPo bought into the scheme and went along with the potential censorship.
"Nobody had any idea that this amount of censorship was going on of legitimate speech," he told the podcast hosts. "That's just a fact – it was simply not reported, there was no evidence. It was just 'suspicions' … and they were being dismissed as conspiracy theories by the mainstream news media and others who wanted to see more censorship by the social media platforms."
He added that he found the engagement of federal intelligence agencies "rather shocking and disturbing."
