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Here’s a telling tale of two “October Surprises” — one seized upon by major media, and one suppressed.
This year’s came from The Atlantic: Jeffrey Goldberg’s “scoop” that then-President Donald Trump reneged on his vow to pay for the funeral of murdered Army Private Vanessa Guillen, and then disparaged her.
It was credited to anonymous sources and rapidly debunked by named sources including her family — yet most of the press still blared it out again; it even led the CBS Evening News.
Goldberg says people claiming to be in the room told him Trump said: “It doesn’t cost 60,000 bucks to bury a f–king Mexican!” on learning of the bill for the funeral.
But people named in the story as there at the time, staffers Kash Patel and Mark Meadows, deny he said that.
And both Guillen’s sister (who says she just voted early for Trump!) and the family’s attorney thoroughly debunked the claim, thanking him for his support.
The story also cites other anonymous sources as claiming Trump once said, “I need the kind of generals that Hitler had,” again contradicted (not anonymously) by others — and a strange thing to keep quiet about for the four years since he supposedly said it.
Yet Goldberg will keep his job at the magazine: The Atlantic is owned by billionaire Laurene Powell Jobs, a good friend of Kamala Harris.
And, again, other outlets breathlessly repeated his account — even bringing Goldberg on-air to repeat and discuss it. Kamala Harris even called an emergency press conference to flog it.
Which brings us to that other October Surprise: this newspaper’s October 2020 reporting off Hunter Biden’s laptop.
It was a series of scoops about how Joe’s son made millions selling influence with the then-vice president to a wide-ranging cast of foreign interests, along with evidence that Biden Sr. was in on the grift.
Yet the liberal press refused to pick it up, calling it “unverified” — Facebook and Twitter suppressed it.
Instead, other media put their work into stories about how we’d fallen for a Russian “disinformation” scheme.
That last charge has since been exposed as a Biden-Harris campaign disinformation scheme. Multiple other media outfits in the years since have themselves verified every bit of our laptop reporting.
(And, it turns out, the FBI had verified the laptop a year before we got our hands on it: It was part of the feds’ evidence when Hunter finally went on trial.)
The bottom line: In most of America’s elite newsrooms, the standard for what October Surprise is fit to print has nothing to do with what’s “unverified,” and everything to do with whether a story hurts or helps the Democrats.
No wonder polls show Americans now put less trust in the media than in Congress.