How the Hunter Biden Laptop Story Disappeared from Fox News Prime Time After the Election

Credit: Mediaite

For years, Fox News’s prime time block has acted as little more than a megaphone for President Donald Trump, echoing, if not feeding, his White House messaging and campaign narratives. Even acknowledging that the network likes to discount those three hours as merely opinion programming, any self-respecting news channel should ostensibly expect its commentary to avoid outright hagiography and a willingness to traffic in a politician’s latest lies. But if there were any nagging doubts as to the symbiotic relationship between Trump and Fox’s three top-rated primetime shows, the way that Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, and Laura Ingraham first devoured and then all but wholly ignored the Hunter Biden laptop story before and after Election Day should put those firmly to rest.

In the days after the New York Post published emails from Hunter Biden’s purported laptop — obtained via bizarre and notably Trump-friendly provenance — the news ricocheted across conservative media as if this were the October surprise that could reshape the 2020 presidential race — similar to the last-minute bombshell from FBI Director James Comey that helped sink Hillary Clinton’s campaign four years earlier.

No matter that any evidence of corrupt influence, much less criminal activity, by Hunter’s father, Democratic candidate Joe Biden, was missing or that efforts by other mainstream news organizations, like NBC News, were notably rebuffed when they tried to review the documents and confirm the scurrilous claims. Fueled by obsessive repetition from Trump himself, Fox News willingly latched on to the “Biden corruption scandal” narrative and refused to let go. And nowhere was this more evident than the network’s peak prime time hours.

In fact, during the two full weeks leading up to Election Day, between Oct. 19 and Oct. 30, Tucker Carlson Tonight, Hannity, and The Ingraham Angle ran segments pushing the Hunter/Joe Biden corruption in 28 of the 30 shows. Sometimes the trio dedicated multiple segments in one hour to covering the supposed scandal. In total, roughly one-quarter of Fox News’ airtime between 8:00 p.m. and 11:00 p.m. — 351 minutes or just under six full hours — was dedicated to this Biden corruption narrative during those two weeks. Other than general campaign updates, this story was the most dominant through-line on the network’s primetime coverage during that period.

And the rhetoric around the story was no less intense, and certainly suggestive that the hosts’ laser focus the story would not soon change.

“This scandal is not going anywhere. This scandal is very serious,” guest David Marcus told Ingraham on Oct. 21.

“It’s a public corruption scandal that is growing by the hour and unraveling before our eyes,” Hannity somberly intoned on Oct. 23.

“How many people out there think a media outlet — regardless of who is in the White House, should regard stories about our adversaries funneling money to family members of a sitting president, that’s not a story?” Ingraham offered in a transparently leading question of debate watchers on Oct. 23, in an implicit critique of how the Hunter Biden story fell flat outside of the conservative media bubble.

“It’s a legitimate story,” Carlson insisted on Oct. 27. “You are looking at a real threat to our democracy, you are watching it unfold, we are seeing it firsthand.”

No host in Fox News primetime went as all-in on the Biden corruption narrative as Carlson. He led the pack with an astounding 190 minutes spent on various aspects of the story, followed by Hannity’s 108 minutes, and Ingraham’s 53.

Likewise, Carlson signaled the story’s importance by leading off eight of his 10 shows in the run-up to Election Day with breathless updates on its latest developments. His entire Oct. 27 show — a massive investment in precious airtime days before the election — was devoted to interviewing former Hunter Biden business associate Tony Bobulinski. This Biden scandal obsession notably paid big dividends in terms of his audience, as Carlson scored monster ratings for the interview. The 8 p.m. Fox host even not-so-subtly suggested that a joint conspiracy between the Democratic Party and the package delivery company UPS was working to undermine his coverage in the days following when a thumb drive of supposedly explosive Biden documents from Bobulinski went missing — before turning up one day later and failing to produce any bombshells.

Fox News prime time also married this Biden corruption narrative with additional meta-criticism of the mainstream press for failing to follow its lead in swallowing the Trump campaign’s framing hook, line, and laptop.

Carlson, Hannity, and Ingraham each spent time slamming the supposed mainstream media cover-up of the story and the second-order scandal involving the supposed left-wing censorship by the press and social media sites like Facebook and Twitter. Notably, this outrage neatly dovetailed with Trump as well, and he pretty much gave the game away on the Monday before the election when he whined that mainstream news outlets weren’t paying enough attention to his campaign’s Hunter Biden corruption oppo dump. “You can’t have a scandal if nobody writes about it,” he complained.

But then Election Day came and went — and with it, apparently, disappeared any real interest by Carlson, Hannity, and Ingraham in the “massive” scandal that, just days earlier, Fox News viewers had been told was “growing by the hour” and “not going anywhere.”

In fact, when Fox News’s regular prime time programming re-emerged on the other side of the network’s round-the-clock election news coverage, mention of terms like “Hunter,” “laptop, and “Bobulinski” all but disappeared. In the two weeks from Thursday, Nov. 5 through Nov. 19, Fox News prime time hosts said those words just a scant 12 times in total, in what was less than 10 minutes of discussion about a “real threat” to democracy across nearly 25 hours of airtime.

Most notably, Carlson led the way in the Biden amnesia, with just the briefest nod to the story his show had gorged on before Election Day. Tony Bobulinski, the man who Fox prime time, and Carlson in particular, had been heralding as the linchpin to perhaps the biggest corruption scandal in the nation’s history, was now suddenly persona non grata, his name never once coming up.

When asked about the vast discrepancy in its prime time coverage before and after the election, Fox News did not comment.

Perhaps Fox News’ primetime pivot away from the baseless Biden corruption scandal and toward indulging the president’s fanciful claims of widespread voter fraud should come as no surprise. It mirrors Trump’s own post-election whiplash-inducing turn from trashing Biden to pushing conspiracy theories about the election. Since November 3, Trump has not tweeted about Hunter Biden, his all-important laptop, or Biden corruption a single time, even as he has flooded his feed with hundreds of false claims and angry accusations trying to dispute his resounding election defeat.

Indeed, the network’s prime time about-face on the threat from Hunter Biden’s laptop is symbolic of a larger reckoning happening at Fox News, which is undergoing a very public bout of cognitive dissonance about how far and how deep it should indulge deranged claims from its number one viewer — and increasingly disaffected critic — in order to salvage its post-election sagging ratings. And it reinforces how the network’s high-profile prime time hosts really do function like a propaganda arm for Trump, offering million of dollars of in-kind contributions to repeat — or concoct — whatever makes the president look good or his political rivals look bad at any given moment.

Make no mistake, though, the programming value of the Hunter Biden corruption narrative to Fox News prime time is not fully dead, even if Trump’s chances of holding onto the presidency are. If the Republicans continue to hold the majority in the Senate, expect Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) to resurrect his fruitless, previously-concluded investigation in the months ahead, in an attempt to hamstring the new Biden administration and taint it with the hint of scandal. Armed with that narrative cudgel, it likely won’t be long before Carlson, Hannity, and Ingraham follow suit and conveniently rediscover the outrage that they so quickly cast aside weeks ago, without offering even the barest of explanations to viewers of why they too had suddenly joined in on the cover-up.

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.