Brian Stelter is out at CNN. NPR reports:
CNN is canceling its Sunday media affairs show Reliable Sources, and host Brian Stelter is departing the network, Stelter tells NPR. . . . CNN chief Chris Licht informed Stelter of the decision yesterday. Licht has been making cuts throughout the network since taking the helm as part of Warner Bros. Discovery’s takeover of the old Time Warner company. Stelter, who often touted the show’s ratings on Twitter, was among those CNN hosts targeted for frequent criticism from conservatives for his coverage of the media in the Trump years.
“Frequent criticism from conservatives” is putting it charitably. Stelter was one of the legacy media’s top contenders for the highly coveted title of Least Self-Aware Man in America. (His erstwhile colleague at CNN, Jim Acosta, is the award’s defending champion.) The media are not wanting in egotistical, preening, self-satisfied buffoons, but rarely in the course of human events have we witnessed such a profound inverse relationship between self-regard and intelligence. Whatever our political disagreements, I can’t help but feel a certain amount of awe at Stelter’s ability to routinely run segments like this one, in which he authoritatively instructed a class of eighth-graders in New York about “how to spot and avoid being misled by misinformation” in the media, with a straight face. (“You want to believe something,” he nods gravely in the clip. “But you gotta face reality head on.”)
At this point it’s almost cliché to say so, but what Stelter meant when he used words like “misinformation” was right-wing. For all the Reliable Sources anchor’s garment-rending about declining trust in the media, he spent a disproportionate amount of time covering for his industry’s egregiously biased, activist behavior over the course of the past few years. He defended his colleague Chris Cuomo’s unethical role as an adviser to his brother, the disgraced former New York governor Andrew Cuomo. He regularly offered up his show as a platform for Biden officials to repeat White House propaganda. On Jussie Smollett, he argued: “We may never know what happened.” And he himself regularly engaged in “misinformation,” including championing the fraudulent “Steele dossier” narrative. (When new details about the dossier’s fraudulent nature emerged, Stelter protested: “I’m a media reporter, and I’m not a Steele dossier reporter.”)
Stelter also served as the mainstream media’s attack dog when right-leaning outlets published stories that were inconvenient for Democrats. As Isaac Schorr and Brittany Bernstein pointed out, for example, Stelter went to the mat to discredit the New York Post’s story on Hunter Biden’s laptop:
Instead of praising the Post for its work, Stelter responded to the story by running a segment called “How the latest anti-Biden narrative was manufactured,” in which he attacked the Post for its reporting, called it part of the “right-wing media machine,” and asserted that the story didn’t “add up.” One year later, precisely none of the Post’s reporting has been debunked and much of it has been confirmed.
All this while complaining, on a near-daily basis, that right-wing media was ruining American democracy and that no one wanted to listen to outlets like CNN anymore. (The journalists! Will someone please think of the journalists!) Stelter’s shtick was, at root, a product of a new paradigm in American media, where journalists at powerful legacy outlets conceive of themselves as a prestigious guild with a specific set of interests rather than as seekers of truth committed to presenting it without fear or favor. Of course, the rhetorical window-dressing — democracy dies in darkness! — is still there. But if you’ve been watching Reliable Sources, you’ve seen Stelter regularly contorting himself into pretzels to defend his guild at all costs. That was his job, as he understood it. It’s difficult to feel sorry that his time at CNN has come to an end.