If the claim is that all of the knowledge can be gained online, I will counter that is the difference between popular-ABC and real-ABC for any given subject ABC. The college forces you to round out your skill set into subjects you might otherwise ignore.
But I do get the frustration with going into huge debt. And we have made obtaining a degree a requirement to get even quite basic jobs now.
I trust NyPost more than activists at Washington Post
(of course Wikipedia is probably "manufactured narrative", right?).
Looks like it's another attempt of finding dirt, but whoever was doing it, put so much of made-up dirt in that laptop, that proper journalists saw it as an "Elvis spotted with aliens" story, even NYPost journalists didn't want anything to do with it:
> According to an investigation by The New York Times, editors at the New York Post "pressed staff members to add their bylines to the story", and at least one refused, in addition to the original author, reportedly because of a lack of confidence in its credibility. Of the two writers eventually credited on the article, the second did not know her name was attached to it until after The Post published it.
The fact that you trust this sort of journalism makes me assume your trust is based on what you find favorable...
Pre-ChatGPT (2022)? Sure. Meme applies. Today, it doesn't make sense--the closest comparison for AI's coding output is that of a mediocre offshore IT outsourcer.
Wikipedia aims to represent the current consensus of reputable sources ("Verifiability, not truth"). I think that's often pragmatic - but it does make it a poor ground truth for specifically the case where someone is claiming that an outlet going against the grain was correct.
Seems to be somewhat alleviated here by reputable outlets having since reconsidered the story a couple years later. The Wikipedia article now mentions the authentication of the emails for instance, instead of only the fabrication/manipulation theory. You could always verify by yourself with the provided DKIM signatures, and that was discussed on the talk page at the time, but couldn't be added to the article because it was considered original research and only reported in security blogs/GitHub repos/unreputable sources.
There are still many material claims in the Wikipedia article which, while maybe verifiable, are highly misleading or untrue (at least, to my understanding of events). The claim that "the shop had no contact information for its owner" seems fairly directly contradicted by documents presented in the initial NYP article, for instance[0].
[0]: https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/10/Comput...
Wikipedia is no oracle they only uses content from sources they view as legitimate and lock anything people disagree with. Its a narrative echo chamber by design
How would you structure a comittee if not split up among democratic countries?
Have a section with a counter perspectives. The fact Wikipedia tries to frame itself as the one true and correct perspective even with topics where opinions can decide what those are.
If you'd bothered to keep reading in Wikipedia, you'd have seen (from after all the shouting subsided):
>Former Politico reporters Marc Caputo and Tara Palmeri said in January 2025 that, because of "dumb decisions of cowardly editors", they were told "Don't write about the laptop, don't talk about the laptop, don't tweet about the laptop". Caputo said the Bertrand story about the 51 former officials had a "terrible, ill-fated headline ... because the Hunter Biden laptop appeared to be true". In 2019 the campaign of a rival Democratic candidate for the 2020 presidential election gave Caputo opposition research on Burisma and Hunter Biden but "That story was killed by the editors, and they gave no explanation for that either", he recalled.
After that, read <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunter_Biden_laptop_letter>.
I know a handful of Post reporters. The short answer is their bar for publishing is lower. That means they catch stories earlier than the majors. (Same way specialist blogs do.) But they also post stuff that later needs to, or should have been, retracted. (Again, like a blog.)
Put another way, it's an entertaining paper that's not really comparable to the Washington Post, Wall Street Journal or New York Times in terms of quality or intent. But it does bring a more conservative angle to the mix in the same way those papers' journalists (or more accurately, e.g. Jon Stewart) bring a liberal/leftist perspective to the fore.
Another way to look at it is that the story stank so much, even NYPost reporters (who are probably used to the gutter journalism) didn't want their name near it.
