(Joshua Paladino, Headline USA) Two ousted mainstream media executives both defended their decisions to manipulate the 2020 election by refusing to report on Joe Biden and Hunter Biden’s corruption in China and Ukraine.
Former CNN President Jeff Zucker and former MSNBC President Phil Griffin both spoke on a panel with Michael Smerconish at the 2022 Un-Convention about the media’s role in political polarization, the Citizen Free Press reported.
Despite losing their jobs in the past year, Zucker and Griffin failed to analyze their own roles in the public’s declining trust in the media.
Zucker said he does not think it is “legitimate” to criticize CNN’s decision to censor the Hunter Biden laptop story.
Fmr CNN boss Jeff Zucker defends the network ignoring evidence of Hunter/Joe Biden corruption before the presidential election: “We didn’t know enough about it .. the messenger on that story was Rudy Giuliani”
“Do I think it’s a legitimate criticism [we ignored it]? Not really” pic.twitter.com/q4rDUNTAbw
— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) October 14, 2022
Griffin defended MSNBC’s role in the cover-up on the basis that federal authorities never charged Hunter—a fact that never exempted former President Donald Trump from constant, slanderous allegations.
MSNBC’s Phil Griffin likewise defends their refusal to do journalism: “He was never arrested … I don’t think it was a big story before the election because he was never charged with anything” pic.twitter.com/fV0Eo570EJ
— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) October 14, 2022
Zucker said he had the right to ignore the story because it involved Hunter, not Joe, but the mainstream media never applied the same standard to Trump’s children.
“We did look into it. But first of all, you know, with regard to the son of the candidate, you know, he was the son of the candidate,” he said. “He wasn’t the candidate.”
Then-CNN contributor and former White House mouthpiece Jen Psaki helped Zucker and Griffin’s campaign to conceal the truth from the American public when she called the laptop story “Russian disinformation.”