Many mainstream news outlets disparaged the story at the time and even credulously repeated suggestions the laptop was a Russian disinformation operation. At the time, NPR public editor Kelly McBride addressed a listener’s question about the news outlet’s blackout of coverage. She said the Post’s reporting had “many, many red flags,” including its potential ties to Russia, and the assertions within the story weren’t significant.
“We don’t want to waste our time on stories that are not really stories, and we don’t want to waste the listeners’ and readers’ time on stories that are just pure distractions,” NPR managing editor Terence Samuel told McBride. “And quite frankly, that’s where we ended up, this was … a politically driven event, and we decided to treat it that way.”
In a stunning tell-all essay published last April, then-veteran NPR editor Uri Berliner recalled the attitude of his liberal colleagues to the laptop revelations.
“The laptop was newsworthy. But the timeless journalistic instinct of following a hot story lead was being squelched,” Berliner wrote. “During a meeting with colleagues, I listened as one of NPR’s best and most fair-minded journalists said it was good we weren’t following the laptop story because it could help Trump.”
“When the essential facts of the Post’s reporting were confirmed and the emails verified independently about a year and a half later, we could have fessed up to our misjudgment. But, like Russia collusion, we didn’t make the hard choice of transparency,” he continued.
During her exchange with Cloud, Maher also acknowledged the legitimacy of the Wuhan lab-leak theory by the CIA after NPR previously dismissed speculation about the COVID pandemic’s origins at the time.
Maher remained adamant that NPR is a “nonpartisan” news organization despite her admissions.
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