NPR public editor really uncomfortable with censorship of Posts Hunter Biden laptop story but gives her own outlet a pass
National Public Radio’s public editor said she was “really uncomfortable” with large tech companies “censoring” The Post’s reporting on the Hunter Biden laptop — but gave her own outlet a free pass for declining to cover the story.Kelly McBride, who has been NPR’s ombudsman since 2020, told The Wrap that tech firms such as X and Facebook were wrong to prevent users from sharing links to The Post’s revelations about the laptop, whose hard drive included emails linking the Biden family to a Ukrainian businessman.“I was really uncomfortable with the tech companies censoring it,” McBride said.“Who are they to be the arbiters of truth?”In April, Uri Berliner, who left NPR after publishing an essay critical of the outlet for its left-wing bias, faulted his former employer for ignoring the laptop story.Nevertheless, McBride, who is now senior vice president at Poynter Institute, told The Wrap that she is more troubled with how tech companies blocked people from reading the story than she is about how NPR covered it.“I understand [the tech companies] try to dial down the spread of information that has been determined to be untrue or distorted.
I get that,” McBride said.“But in this case, I don’t think they had the due process in place to determine if this information was being distorted.”At the time, NPR also declined to cover the laptop story.
Terence Samuels, who was NPR’s managing editor at the time, said his outlet didn’t “want to waste our time on stories that are not really stories.”McBride said that NPR couldn’t adequately cover the laptop story because The Post “didn’t make the entire laptop available.” She also accused The Post of “shaming and humiliating” Hunter Biden.“That’s not the kind of journalism NPR does and it’s not the kind of story that NPR’s audience is interested in,” McBride said.McBride also denied that NPR’s left-leaning bent was why it declined to cover the story.“It wasn’t t...