#The media — and social media — drive to squelch information a menace no matter who wins election

The incredible decision by Twitter and Facebook to block access to a New York Post story about a cache of e-mails reportedly belonging to Democratic nominee Joe Biden’s son Hunter, with Twitter going so far as to lock the 200-year-old newspaper out of its own account for more than a week, continues to be a major underreported scandal.

The hypocrisy is mind-boggling. Imagine the reaction if that same set of facts involved The New York Times and any of its multitudinous unverifiable “exposés” from the last half-decade: from the similarly leaked “black ledger” story implicating Paul Manafort, to its later-debunked “repeated contacts with Russian intelligence” story, to its mountain of articles about the far more dubious Steele dossier.

The flow of information in the United States has become so politicized — bottlenecked by an increasingly brazen union of corporate press and tech platforms — that it’s become ­impossible for American audiences to see news about certain topics absent thickets of propagandistic contextualizing.

Try to look up anything about ­Burisma, Joe Biden or Hunter Biden in English, and you’re likely to be shown a pile of “fact-checks” and explainers ahead of the raw information.

As has been hinted at by several prominent journalists, controversies erupted within newsrooms across New York and Washington in the last week. Editors have been telling staffers that any effort to determine whether or not the Biden laptop material is true, or to ask the Biden campaign to confirm or deny the story, will either not be allowed or put through heightened fact-checking procedures.

On the other hand, if you want to assert without any evidence at all that the New York Post story is Russian interference, you can essentially go straight into print.

Many people on the liberal side of the political aisle don’t have a problem with this, focused as they are on the upcoming Trump-Biden election. But this same press corps might be weeks away from assuming responsibility for challenging a Biden ­administration. If they’ve already calculated once that a true story may be buried for political reasons, because the other “side” is worse, they will surely make that same calculation again.

What happens a month from now when an ambitious Republican like Sen. Tom Cotton leaks a document damaging to a President-Elect Biden? Or two years from now, if in the weeks before midterm elections, we get bad economic news, or a Biden-Harris administration foreign-policy initiative takes a turn for the worse? Are we sure those stories will be run?

The Republican version of the Burisma story — essentially, that former General Prosecutor Viktor Shokin was Elliott Ness, and Joe Biden intervened to fire him specifically to aid his son’s company — is also not supported by evidence. What Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani and his cohorts have done to date is take a few unreported or underreported facts and leap straight to a maximalist interpretation of corruption on Joe Biden’s part.

This isn’t right, but the room to make that argument has been created by the ongoing squelching of information coming from Ukraine. The suppression story is almost certainly a bigger scandal than the Hunter Biden affair itself, but it’s all become part of the same picture.

Examining the timeline of Hunter Biden’s work for Burisma, and Joe Biden’s urging of the firing of Shokin, shows several things that have been quietly non-reported on our side of the Atlantic.

One is that Shokin, at least early in his short tenure, opened several cases against Burisma (including a tax-evasion matter), while inheriting several others. Two, even after most American newspapers were describing ­Burisma cases as “dormant,” there was evidence of open ­investigations, including one that specifically mentioned Hunter’s company Rosemont-Seneca, and another involving the seizure ­order of February 2016, for which Shokin does appear to have ­responsibility.

Lastly, it’s unquestionable that the cases against Burisma were all closed by Shokin’s successor, chosen in consultation with Joe Biden, whose son remained on the board of said company for three more years, earning upward of $50,000 per month.

This is all information that the press should want to ask more about, even before the issue of the e-mails in the New York Post story. They may not be world-shaking matters. But if such stories become off-limits just because they make the wrong people look bad, we do have a serious problem, no matter who wins the presidency.

Matt Taibbi blogs at Substack. Subscribe to his blog at taibbi.substack.com