Rick Perlstein on Hunter Biden and the echoes of Jimmy Carter’s brother
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In the weeks leading up to the 2020 presidential election, I interviewed Rick Perlstein—a leading historian of the conservative movement, whose latest book, Reaganland, had recently been published—for CJR. We discussed the endless (but misleading) media comparisons between the 2020 and 1968 elections, but also the many media themes and foibles lurking beneath the surface of Reaganland and Perlstein’s other books—from sensationalism to persistent false equivalence between Democrats and Republicans—and how they echo in contemporary political coverage. (“The secret is I’ve really produced a three-thousand-page exercise in media criticism,” Perlstein told me.) At one point, Perlstein noted overblown coverage of a scandal involving Jimmy Carter’s brother, Billy, in the run-up to the 1980 presidential election, and compared it to coverage, in 2020, of Joe Biden’s son Hunter. In a separate interview around the same time, Perlstein characterized the Billy Carter scandal as the “But her emails! of 1980.”
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