Comment by lockhouse | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lockhouse | Hacker News Reader

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What I stated is true.

The Dossier is a fake, and it was paid for by the Hillary Clinton campaign. The FBI also reached an agreement to pay Cristopher Steele $1 million to continue work on the dossier. Apparently this deal was scrapped and the payment never went through, but again, this is pretty disturbing that it went that far.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/25/us/politics/steele-dossie...

Also, the Hunter Biden laptop has been confirmed to be authentic and not Russian disinformation. The story was originally broken by the NY Post, but it was heavily suppressed by other media outlets and the NY Post’s social media accounts were blocked, as were those of pretty much anyone that attempted to share the story. The Intelligence community worked pretty much in lockstep to discredit the laptop as Russian disinformation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunter_Biden_laptop_controvers...

(Yes, I know Wikipedia, but the only sources that really reported on it are Conservative-leaning media outlets like NY Post, Fox News, and Daily Wire, so I thought Wikipedia would be considered a bit more neutral.)

thanks for providing those sources, but I still think it's important to acknowledge that the claims you made are heavily disputed

what you stated were your conclusions (which may or may not be true):

- that the dossier was paid opposition research is not disputed, what is disputed is the veracity of its contents. Nothing in the link you shared suggests it was confirmed fake. In fact, many of the claims made in the dossier have been corroborated by subsequent investigations.

- On the other hand, while the the Hunter Biden laptop (also opposition research) has been authenticated, the veracity of the claims made about it are still in question, and many media outlets declined to run the story due to a lack of supporting evidence.

- Another difference to highlight is that Christopher Steele was an experienced professional who followed standard journalistic practices to protect his sources, etc., whereas Rudy Giuliani's handling of the Hunter Biden laptop (to put it very lightly) has been criticized as unprofessional and lacking in evidence.

- I'm not saying that bias in media coverage doesn't exist, but news organizations have a responsibility to verify stories with evidence before publishing them. It's also worth noting that the burden of proof is higher for claims that are "difficult to verify, yet easy to fake" (So it's not surprising that some stories are given more attention than others depending on the strength of the evidence supporting them)

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