Mediaite’s Colby Hall Calls Out Media Coverage of Discredited Hunter Biden Story: ‘Smear’ is Trump Campaign’s ‘Buzzer Shot’

Medaite Founding Editor Colby Hall called out media coverage surrounding the discredited story of Hunter Biden’s alleged laptop during a Saturday appearance on NewsmaxTV.

Host Carl Higbie opened the segment with the topic of President Donald Trump’s premature release of a 60 Minutes interview, which Trump claimed was unfair, but which Hall noted simply consisted of “tough questions” asked by anchor Lesley Stahl, which Trump was “not interested in.”

“The traditional standard of journalism is to speak truth to power,” Hall said, and added that Trump only wanted PR-friendly or “nice questions.”

Higbie then played a clip of Vice President Joe Biden deriding the laptop story to a local ABC News affiliate, calling it “garbage” and a smear, and that “there’s no basis at all” for the story.

Higbie called the largely unverified story a “tough issue” for Biden “because it’s been kind of legitimized at this point.”

Hall replied by defining the term “smear campaign,” which is to report on things on unverified facts and innuendo, and added “There is no reputable news outlet that has proven anything that has come out of this laptop that suggests anything wrong.”

“The only thing that we’ve really heard about this is from the opinion side of news outlets at Fox News,” he said.

“I reported the Fox News news division passed on the story. Wall Street Journal’s opinion side wrote a long piece about this Thursday night and raised questions, but their news side effectively shut it down.”

“You know, the standards of journalism you don’t run the story until it’s confirmed,” Hall added, pointing out that “the only thing that’s confirmed about the story is one email from the individual Tony Bobulinski.”

“This feels like a buzzer shot, this is a buzzer shot by the Trump campaign because there is no there there, and people don’t really care,” Hall said.

Washington Free Beacon writer and fellow panelist Chrissy Clark then falsely claimed that the FBI Director Christopher Wray has verified the story, which he has not, in fact, done.

Watch above via NewsMax TV

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