There’s a very funny sketch, now used regularly as a meme in many Internet circles, from a 2019 episode of comedian Tim Robinson’s Netflix show I Think You Should Leave. The three-minute clip opens with a hot-dog-themed car crashing through a storefront window. The crowd inside, aghast, begins trying to piece together what happened. “Somebody call the cops,” one man exclaims. “We need to find that driver.” A woman chimes in: “He could have killed someone.”
Then, the camera pans to a man dressed head to toe in a hot-dog costume. The crowd is suspicious. “Sir, that’s clearly your car,” one woman says. The hot-dog man’s eyes dart around nervously. “You know what’s driving me nuts?,” he intones. “It could literally be any one of us.”
“Yeah,” he continues earnestly. “We’re all trying to figure out who did this.”
Anyway, Brian Stelter is the man in the hot-dog costume. More or less. The host of CNN’s Reliable Sources ran a segment yesterday in which his team visited a New York classroom that was teaching its eighth graders “how to spot and avoid being misled by misinformation.” The school “wants to arm this eighth-grade class with the tools they will need in a world of information saturation,” Stelter enthused.
“And there is a lot to learn. Just imagine trying to make sense of all of this as a teenager!”
Imagine! I’m sure Stelter can. The self-appointed authority on all things news media spends a disproportionate amount of his time waxing poetic about the problem of “misinformation.” Funnily enough, it always seems to come from right-wing media — and never from CNN.
Misinformation in the media — it’s a real problem, isn’t it? “That gets to the motivations [driving misinformation],” he sagely tells one student. “You want to believe something. But you gotta face reality head on.”
Except for when that “something” is, say, the Steele dossier. The fraudulent document alleging contacts between the Trump campaign and Russia that Stelter and the rest of CNN covered obsessively was revealed to be sourced from a suspected Russian agent. In fact, Stelter accused Kellyanne Conway of spreading misinformation herself for calling the dossier “completely unverified” in November 2017. When new revelations surfaced about the dossier’s illegitimacy, Stelter reneged: “I’m a media reporter, and I’m not a Steele dossier reporter,” he protested.
Remember: It could literally be any of us. I’m struck by the inescapable image of a sequel to the hot-dog-car sketch in which the man in the hot-dog costume is instructing a class of eighth graders on the dangers of hot-dog-themed cars.
We’re all trying to figure out who did this.