NPR chief admits to Congress it was a mistake to discredit and not cover Hunter Biden's laptop story

The current executive director of NPR, Katherine Maher acknowledged before Congress that it wasa mistake to have discredited and ignored the story of Hunter Biden's missing laptop, which at the time was censored on various social media platforms and little covered by major U.S. media outlets.

In a congressional hearing, Maher and PBS executive director Paula Kerger were grilled by House Republicans on the newly formed 'Delivering on Government Efficiency (DOGE)' subcommittee.

The hearing dealt with allegations of bias in federally funded (taxpayer money) news coverage.

"I do want to say that NPR acknowledges we were mistaken in failing to cover the Hunter Biden laptop story more aggressively and sooner," Maher said responding to questioning from Rep. Michael Cloud, R-Texas.

Then, in an exchange with Rep. Brian Jack, R-Georgia, Maher reiterated, "We made a mistake."

Maher, named NPR's executive director in 2024, was not at the public broadcaster when the Hunter Biden saw the light of day thanks to a New York Post report in 2020, weeks before the presidential election pitting Donald Trump and Joe Biden against each other.

While Maher attempted to defend NPR as a 'non-partisan' organization, during several stretches of testimony he admitted to Republican questioning several troubling situations, such as the fact that the board of the media organization is made up mostly of Democrats.

At the time, the NYP's reporting revealed explicit and controversial content from the then-son of the Democratic presidential candidate. Among many revelations, the New York tabloid reported how Hunter Biden used his father's political influence to do shady business overseas and also how his father, as vice president, pressured the Ukrainian government to fire Viktor Shokin, a Ukrainian prosecutor who was investigating an energy company for corruption for which Hunter worked.

The scandal, which grew over time, was discredited by the vast majority of the progressive U.S. media. Many of them, in addition to ignoring the laptop story, also decided to accuse the New York Post of spreading Russian disinformation in the middle of the election campaign, suggesting that the report was a political stunt aimed at benefiting Trump. NPR was one of the many U.S. media outlets to take a clear editorial stance on the issue, with the aggravating factor that it is a taxpayer-funded organization.

For example, in 2020, NPR's then-public editor, Kelly McBride responded to a listener who queried her aboutwhy NPR did not cover the Hunter Biden laptop scandal.

In his response, McBride said the NYP story had "many, many red flags," including unproven ties to Russia.

NPR managing editor Terence Samuel was even more radical in his stance, claiming Hunter Biden's laptop was nothing more than a political stunt.

"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," Samuel told McBride. "And quite frankly, that's where we ended up, this was … a politically driven event, and we decided to treat it that way."

Eventually, after Joe Biden won the election in 2020, federal authorities announced investigations against Hunter Biden and the media began to give the laptop story more coverage after it had been discredited and ignored for months. Eventually, the former Democratic president's son was found guilty of several federal crimes, thanks in part to information gleaned from the laptop abandoned in a Delaware garage.