This past Friday, Apple Daily Taiwan had what can only be described as a blockbuster story tying in US Presidential Candidate Joseph Biden’s son Hunter with Chinese Communist Party members as well as a Taiwan KMT fixer, named Michael Lin.

The story dominated Taiwan news for days and had solid play on social media in the US after we did an English translation of the story. It is the type of story that the US media, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, even CNN, in the past, would show up at our door seeking information. Not this time.

Since 2001 I cannot recall one single story involving US politicians and scandals in Asia where I have not received phone calls from members of the US news media. In 2016/17 I fielded at least 20 phone calls or emails from different organizations on Donald Trump. From Bill and Hillary Clinton to Newt Gingrich, Charlie Rangel, and even a visit by Supreme Justice Scalia to Hong Kong the calls on anything politically related to the US came in.

The Hunter Biden story that Apple Daily is currently working is multiples in terms of being larger and more significant than anything else we have seen on US politics in Asia since 2017.

Yet, it’s been crickets. There’s been one intrepid reporter of a major US paper who has called with firm questions. He made it clear no one back in the US, his editors, were interested.

What’s going on?  Well, there is more than enough meat to this story and it’s complete with photos, visits, company documents, and a fairly recognizable theme, influence peddling. Put that together with the name Biden, it’s a story worth time in the New York Times or Wall Street Journal.

So why no story? When everyone looks for conspiracy, I look to incompetence. This time in addition to incompetence, add vanity. CNN, MSNBC, The New York Times, Reuters, The Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal not doing the Hunter Biden story will be considered by many a conspiracy of the left wingers who dominate newsrooms, but it’s really just incompetence combined with overwrought souls in newsrooms who have granted themselves the right of intolerance of information they don’t like.

I have the luxury of not working in a US newsroom.  Apple Daily reporters are not really interested in the US politics of it all, they have a KMT target in mind. Yet even here there are questions why news outlets won’t do news. Apple Daily has a very strong political point of view, but I can’t think of any time we passed on a political scandal with even near the meat that is out there with Hunter Biden.

Now, in a world of subscription journalism, where subscribers are who you write for, and their wrath is what you seek to avoid, it’s my belief that just like in the days when I had to go sooth advertisers, editors have to be willing to sooth upset subscribers.  As for the lefties in the newsrooms?  There are what, about 100 resumes per day for reporter jobs coming in?

It’s completely consistent for The New York Times or MSNBC and the Washington Post to push a liberal political agenda and still ask basic questions about whether a sitting Vice-President’s kid was selling influence to a repressive totalitarian regime.

Here’s how you do it.  You just do it.

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