They aren't yet serious about factual reporting.

I missed this.  This past Sunday, The Washington Post acknowledged in an editorial that they had in fact suppressed the Hunter Biden laptop story which raised flags about Hunter Biden's financial shenanigans with China, Russia and Ukraine and which possibly implicated the then candidate for the presidency, Joe Biden.  From The Hunter Biden story is an opportunity for a reckoning by Editorial Board of The Washington Post.  

For now, what’s more compelling than the assorted accusations about the Bidens’ behavior is this question: Why is confirmation of a story that first surfaced in the fall of 2020 emerging only now? When the New York Post published its blockbuster exclusive on the contents of a laptop said to have been abandoned at a Delaware repair shop by Hunter Biden, mainstream media organizations balked at running with the same narrative. Social media sites displayed even greater caution. Twitter blocked the story altogether, pointing to a policy against hacked materials, and suspended the New York Post’s account for sharing it; Facebook downranked the story in the algorithms that govern users’ news feeds for fear that it was based on misinformation. Now, The Washington Post and the New York Times have vouched for many of the relevant communications.

Everyone else did it, is their excuse.

The sophomorically melodramatic tagline which they adopted on Donald Trump's election in 2016, Democracy Dies in Darkness, takes on a more sinister cast with this admission of mainstream media collusion.  

Their admission that they suppressed a critical story is hedged.  They insist, despite Hunter Biden's allusions to "the Big Guy", that there is no evidence that Joe Biden himself was corrupt.  They couch the story as having occurred "in the fall of 2020" rather than as breaking just three critical weeks before the presidential election.  

They insist that conservatives are entirely without grounds for believing that there was a liberal media effort to suppress critical news despite listing the New York Times, NPR, Washington Post, Facebook and Twitter as all having "balked at running with the same narrative."

The editorial board also believes they had good reasons for not running with the story.  Of course, NPR, even at the time, had similar good reasons:

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NPR Public Editor Kelly McBride elaborated back then “The biggest reason you haven’t heard much on NPR about the [New York] Post story is that the assertions don’t amount to much.”  That assertions that a leading presidential candidate's son had dubious business ties with Russian, Ukrainian and Chinese businesses and that there were indications that that candidate, Joe Biden, might have benefited from those ties and might also have intervened on behalf of his son when Biden was Vice President don't amount to much is rather an astonishing claim.  

Certainly four years earlier, New York Times, Washington Post and NPR were all agog over possible business ties between then candidate Donal trump and Russian interests.  Twitter and Facebook had no qualms about facilitating these speculations.  Business ties which did not even exist, in contrast to those of Hunter Biden.  And ties alleged through purchased campaign disinformation (the Steele Dossier) rather than through an actual laptop having been owned by Hunter Biden.  

Two years after the election, The Washington Post and The New York Times have now acknowledged that they suppressed election-critical information three weeks before the election in 2020 in order to protect candidate, Joe Biden, whom they had both endorsed.  I wonder if we will be seeing anything similar from NPR.

This all further reinforces the skepticism I hold when I hear the mainstream media complaining about disinformation and misinformation campaigns and complaining that America Has a Free Speech Problem.  The Washington Post, The New York Times, NPR and their ilk are all the first practitioners of stemming the flow of news for political and ideological reasons, and they all are ready practitioners of cancel culture, having fired numerous seasoned reporters for reporting factual news.  

They want the power of controlling information for their own ends but simultaneously don't want to be seen as too obviously doing so.  Hence mea culpas around the Hunter Biden laptop story.  But their dismissiveness about how consequential that suppression was, their jibes at allegations from the conservative press who were in fact correct in their reporting, and their continuing pretense that there really isn't much that is likely to emerge from the laptop which might impugn Joe Biden all belie their confessions.

They aren't yet serious about factual reporting.