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AP Hyping Hunter Biden’s New Memoir, Lamenting GOP’s ‘Ongoing Target’

Posted on 04 February 2021

The Associated Press on Thursday hyped a new memoir from the troubled son of Joe Biden, insisting that Republicans are making an “ongoing target” of Hunter Biden. The younger Biden is being investigated by the Justice Department over his taxes and connections to China and the Ukraine. But the AP’s Hillel Italie had more important things to discuss. The headline gushed, “Hunter Biden’s memoir ‘Beautiful Things’ out in April.”      The journalist cheered a blurb from famous novelist Stephen King:  “Beautiful Things” was circulated among several authors and includes advance praise from Stephen King, Dave Eggers and Anne Lamott. “In his harrowing and compulsively readable memoir, Hunter Biden proves again that anybody — even the son of a United States President — can take a ride on the pink horse down nightmare alley,” King writes in his blurb. “Biden remembers it all and tells it all with a bravery that is both heartbreaking and quite gorgeous. He starts with a question: Where’s Hunter? The answer is he’s in this book, the good, the bad, and the beautiful.”                          The article offered the typically dismissive tone that most mainstream journalists adopted during the presidential election. Italie chided that Beautiful Things “was kept under wraps even as Biden’s business dealings became a fixation of then-President Donald Trump and others during the election and his finances a matter of investigation by the Justice Department.”  In the next to last paragraph he, finally, got to the substance of the allegations against Hunter Biden, making sure to refer to “unsubstantiated charges of corruption.”  Hunter Biden is a lawyer and former lobbyist whose work helped lead to the first impeachment of Trump. Biden joined the board of the Ukrainian gas company Burisma in 2014, around the time his father, then U.S. vice president, was helping conduct the Obama administration’s foreign policy in that region. Trump and others have insisted that Biden was exploiting his father’s name, and they raised unsubstantiated charges of corruption.  The book will be released on April 6. Serious journalists should use any book deal to ask him about his tax problems and connections to China and Ukraine. On Thursday, NBC's Peter Alexander offered a bland question about the status of the book with no follow-up:      PETER ALEXANDER: Last question if I can. Hunter Biden has a memoir to be published in April. I guess my question is, is that book subject to a clearance process, to a clearance review? JEN PSAKI: Well, for those of you who had not seen the news, it was announced I believe by Simon & Schuster this morning. I do have a statement from Joe and Jill Biden in their personal capacity as his parents. “We admire our son Hunter's strength and courage to talk openly about his addiction so that others might see themselves in his journey and find hope.” This is a personal book about his own personal journey.” I will leave it at that.  In December, the networks all parroted Biden administration talking points, citing “vicious personal attacks” and that the son has denied any wrongdoing.