Stephen Hayes, the editor and CEO of the Never Trump website The Dispatch, told Fox News viewers on Monday night that his publication, which Big Tech employs to censor content including pro-life posts, did not see enough evidence about the Hunter Biden laptop story to “fact-check” it.
“We didn’t do a straight-up fact-check on the Hunter Biden story in part because there wasn’t enough information in those early days to do a definitive fact-check,” Hayes said of the story that Big Tech throttled and corrupt media ignored in the weeks leading up to the pivotal 2020 presidential election. “That’s part of the role of fact-checkers, determining what’s factual so that you’re correcting facts rather than trying to correct opinion.”
Hayes also tooted his publication’s horn for joining Big Tech’s censorship campaigns and even criticized Facebook for not silencing enough speech, saying it allows “hateful content and misinformation content to go viral.”
“The Dispatch is part of that fact-checking program. We think we’re doing good as a part of that fact-checking program, but if it is the case that Facebook is preferring or tweaking an algorithm to allow hateful content and misinformation content to go viral at the same time, well, it’s going to overwhelm the efforts of people who are trying to do a good job to correct that,” Hayes said.
Just weeks before the November election, The New York Post reported that a laptop containing evidence implicating then-presidential candidate Joe Biden’s son for engaging in shady business dealings overseas had surfaced after it was abandoned by Hunter Biden at a computer repair shop. Documents from the Delaware shop appear to show a signed receipt from the Biden son for the repairs. Emails, text messages, and videos from the laptop even point to a “pay-to-play scandal” involving the current president.
These reports, however, were censored by Big Tech companies such as Facebook and Twitter who rely on “fact-checkers” to do their bidding. Democrats, the Biden family, and corrupt corporate media outlets also ignored the evidence and claimed it was a nothingburger planted by Russians.
The Dispatch editor-in-chief Jonah Goldberg was one of the many people on the left and in the corrupt corporate media to pretend shortly before the 2020 presidential election that the Hunter Biden story was Russian disinformation.
Wait you believe the computer repair shop story? Like at face value?
— Jonah Goldberg (@JonahDispatch) October 17, 2020
Josh, you’re a political operative though, right? Just trying to level set. (By the way I think it’s worth covering. I just think you guys — as political operatives — are wildly overselling it while playing the just-concerned-about-good-journalism-card).
— Jonah Goldberg (@JonahDispatch) October 28, 2020
At the same time, just one month before the election, Hayes’s publication, which routinely employs anti-Trump rhetoric to malign faithful Christians, colluded with Big Tech to censor two advertisements from pro-lifers about then-Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden and VP nominee Kamala Harris’s views on late-term abortions. The ads rightfully pointed out that Biden said he wants no restrictions on “a woman’s right” to choose, but that didn’t stop the “independent fact-checkers” from drudging up some excuse to target the pro-life group. Using the same tactics that Hayes said they couldn’t do on the Hunter Biden story, The Dispatch censored the ads with a “partly false” rating that claimed Biden has not explicitly stated support for late-term abortions.
Source: The Federalist
