MAGA scrambles to repair the Hunter Biden narrative - POLITICO

Instead of publishing the more salacious allegations, conservative media has been more focused on covering alleged suppression of the story.

Yet with less than a week to go, Giuliani, President Donald Trump’s personal lawyer, is still moving down the conservative media food chain, looking for takers.

The Wall Street Journal and Fox News have both reported finding no evidence that former Vice President Joe Biden benefited from the Hunter Biden business dealings that have drawn scrutiny.

And conservative talking heads — pundits, politicians and loud MAGA Twitter personalities alike — have been more focused on the meta narrative around the laptop, arguing that mainstream media, social media companies and the deep state are conspiring to prevent President Donald Trump’s reelection by suppressing the story.

Ultimately, the bulk of fresh allegations have been reduced to public statements from Tony Bobulinski, Hunter Biden’s former business partner, who found a willing partner in Fox News host Tucker Carlson on Tuesday night.

As much disdain as the president’s supporters have for the media, their ultimate goal was to place a story in a well-known, conservative-leaning outlet that conclusively showed Biden profiting off his son’s business deals.

Doing so would simultaneously establish the conservative media’s journalistic prowess and bolster MAGA claims of mainstream media bias.

Instead, these outlets have turned their firepower toward other reliable topics: social media bias; deep state plots; and the media’s failure to cover a story they themselves have backed away from, leaving Giuliani and Bobulinski to sell the story to the fringe.

But as the Journal reviewed the Hunter Biden documents, Giuliani and Bobulinski started to push every part of the story everywhere — first in the New York Post, then across OAN, Newsmax and whatever outlet would take their content?

But with bits and pieces of the entire Hunter Biden narrative floating across the conservative mediasphere, few people on the right have been able to explain who, exactly, did what, on behalf of whom.

Angelo Carusone, a longtime monitor of conservative media and president of the progressive group Media Matters for America, said the situation has all the ingredients of a scandal, but that no one can agree on exactly what the scandal is.

But the insinuation of the story, and its promotion by the president, is enough to keep the emotional core of the narrative alive.

Stories about the Hunter story keep popping up on lesser right-wing blogs, and coverage about the elites’ alleged censorship of the story dominates the conservative news cycle

And with less than a week left before the election, the window for conservatives to center around a singular narrative about Hunter Biden’s alleged crimes — and how they actually connect with Joe Biden — is closing by the day

The appearance brought immediate gratification to the conservative world, ranging from calls to investigate Biden to calls for the story to break out of the right-wing echo chamber