NPR Editor Who Censored Hunter Biden Laptop Story Questions Maine Wire’s Noncitizen Voter Reporting

The Boston Globe on Monday published a front-page story featuring the Maine Wire’s investigative report which found noncitizens are registered to vote in Maine and votes have been cast in their names since 2016.

For context, here’s the reporting the Maine Wire has done so far showing that non-citizens are registered to vote in Maine and that votes are being cast in their names:

• Exclusive: Records Show Votes Cast Under Names of Non-Citizens in Multiple Maine Elections Since 2016
• The Blob: Maine Wire Exposes Non-Citizen Voting and Election Vulnerabilities Created by Paroled Illegal Aliens [PODCAST]
• Top Maine Democrats Decline to Investigate Full Scope of Legal and Illegal Aliens Voting in Maine’s Elections
• Why the Maine Wire Won’t Turn Over Records Proving Non-Citizens Are Voting in Maine’s Elections

Now, to the Boston Globe story: Boston Globe reporter Aidan Fitz Ryan lied when he said I declined an interview. I did not. I answered a series of questions he sent in two emails, and in my initial reply email, I offered to meet in person. I did, however, decline to participate in a phone call. I’ve worked in media long enough to know that when you deal with outlets that have a history of dishonest hackery, like the Boston Globe, it’s best to have a written record so that when those outlets dishonestly report on your interactions, as the Globe has done, you can rub their noses in it, as I plan to do. Apart from falsely claiming that I declined an interview, Ryan did about as fair a job as you can accept from someone who is a colleague of Kevin Cullen and an employee of John Henry.

However, for the story Ryan contacted a “media ethicist” who complained that the Maine Wire’s reporting on the noncitizen voters was deficient because we did not contact the legal and illegal aliens who are, according to Medicaid records and Central Voter Registration (CVR) system records, illegally registered to vote.

According to the Globe’s “media ethicist,” the right and proper thing would have been to hire several translators and go interview the legal and illegal aliens, perhaps to ask them why their leaked health care records and CVR records show that they’ve committed Class C deportable crimes.

Whether to seek out the illegally registered noncitizen voters was a matter that the Maine Wire did, in fact, consider; however, we ultimately decided that confronting the legal and illegal aliens with evidence of the election crimes that had been committed under their names would present an unacceptable risk to our source.

Conducting these interviews would necessarily involve informing the legal and illegal aliens (some of whom have severe intellectual disabilities) that we had obtained their sensitive medical records. The first phone call these individuals would have made, after shooing us out the door, would have set in motion a chain of events that, very likely, would have led to the outing of our source.

The Globe’s “media ethicist” disagreed.

So who is this “media ethicist”?

None other than Kelly McBride, Senior Vice President and Chair of Craig Newmark Center for Ethics and Leadership at the Poynter Institute.

Sounds like a fancy title.

Maine Wire readers will know her better as NPR’s “Public Editor,” a position from which she decided that the ethical thing to do during the 2020 election was to join the military-industrial complex and Big Tech in censoring the Hunter Biden laptop story.

As the NPR Public Editor, McBride runs the account that posted this legendary tweet, and she even retweeted it from her small personal account.

For those in need of a history lesson, the New York Post’s October 2020 series of investigative reports revealed that Hunter Biden, the son of then-Vice President and Democratic candidate for president Joe Biden, had serially leveraged his father’s political office for personal, familial financial gain.

The emails, which were obtained from a laptop computer Hunter Biden abandoned at a Delaware computer shop, contained smoking-gun evidence of rank corruption within the Biden family, including evidence that Joe Biden himself was aware of, participated in, and benefited financially from the corrupt schemes. Secondary to the odious public corruption, the data from the laptop showed that the Vice President’s son had a prodigious appetite for crack cocaine and sex workers, including some who appeared young enough to have just gotten their driver’s licenses.

The reporting was easily the most significant and newsworthy journalism of the entire campaign season. However, because it was significant and newsworthy journalism that harmed Biden’s presidential campaign (and helped Republican President Donald Trump’s re-election effort), the Democratic machine quickly spun into action. What followed was the most frightening and far-reaching censorship effort the nation had ever seen.

In the middle of it all was Kelly McBride.

Within days, 51 members of the military-industrial complex (or intelligence community, or deep state, whichever you prefer) had signed a letter claiming that the New York Post’s true and accurate reporting was in fact Russian disinformation. At the same time, Facebook and Twitter deployed elaborate censorship tools to prevent the story from being shared, even in private messages, and quashed all attempts to draw attention to the true and accurate reporting.

NPR, the taxpayer-funded propaganda generator, joined in the censorship effort, with Kelly McBride at the helm. In a tweet explaining why the taxpayer-funded propaganda outlet was joining the military industrial complex and Big Tech in censoring the New York Post’s bombshell reporting, McBride posted and retweeted a statement from Terence Samuels, NPR’s Managing Editor for News:

“We don’t want to waste our time on stories that are not really stories, and we don’t want to waste the listeners’ and readers’ time on stories that are just pure distractions.”

In other words, “media ethicist” Kelly McBride thinks that concrete evidence that the Vice President and then-candidate for president leveraged his political office for personal financial gain is just a distraction. As opposed to, say, the real journalism NPR specializes in, like the future fixability of McDonald’s ice cream machines.

Once the Nov. 2020 elections were over and Biden was declared the winner, the veracity of the New York Post’s reporting became less important for the military-industrial complex, Big Tech, and left-wing media outlets to deny. This is why, over the past four years, the New York Times, Facebook, and even the Department of Justice have all acknowledged that the Hunter Biden laptop was and is real. In fact, not one word or clause of the New York Post’s reporting has ever been shown to be inaccurate.

As for the 51 deep state hacks who falsely maligned the New York Post in a bid to influence the election, none have apologized or suffered any consequences for their lies.

Ditto for “media ethicist” Kelly McBride, who continues to cast aspersions on actual journalist who are doing real investigative reporting. According to her Poynter biography, the “media ethicist” remains an employee of NPR, despite (or perhaps because of) the fact that she participated in an egregious act of illiberal censorship to influence an election.

While her salary as NPR’s “public editor” isn’t public, the Poynter Institute for Media Studies most recent Form 990 shows that McBride earned $218,692 in 2022 as a “media ethicist.”

Ironically, McBride’s NPR biography describes her role at Poynter as serving as the “journalism industry’s ombudsman” and making Poynter “a place where journalists, ethicists and citizens convene to elevate American discourse and battle disinformation and bias.”

Perhaps it would be more honest and ethical for McBride’s biography to state instead that she has used and continues to use her position to spread disinformation, promote left-wing media bias, and debase American discourse by unfairly maligning the work of actual journalists.