Stelter ended his nine-year run with CNN by casting himself as a beleaguered defender of truth and democracy.
Welcome back to Forgotten Fact-Checks, a weekly column produced by National Review’s News Desk. This week, we evaluate the legacy of Brian Stelter and hit more media misses.
Stelter’s Last Stand
Brian Stelter ended a nine-year run as the host of CNN’s Reliable Sources on Sunday, insisting in his final monologue that “it’s not partisan to stand up for decency and democracy and dialogue,” or “to stand up to demagogues.”
It is, however, partisan to conceive of loyalty to the Democratic Party as standing up for democracy and participation in the smearing of its political opponents as standing up to demagogues. And for nine years, that was what Brian Stelter did, day-in and day-out, on CNN.
While professing to be a, if not the, journalistic gatekeeper, Stelter regaled his audience with tales about the corrupt and dishonest right-wing media, adding color to the “vast right-wing conspiracy” once described by Hillary Clinton.
He called the Hunter Biden laptop story a “classic example of the right-wing media machine,” and a “manufactured scandal,” saying that it was the product of “resentment” over the Trump–Russia collusion narrative he helped push (“what does Putin have on Trump?” he once asked, implying that Trump was doing Putin’s bidding to avoid being publicly embarrassed.) He lamented that “we may never really know” what happened to actor Jussie Smollett — who faked a hate crime against himself in 2019 — and chided conservative commentators who provided accurate reporting on the story. He gloated that CNN probably hadn’t paid much in damages to a high-school student it devoted significant air time to smearing. He defended the debunked Steele Dossier, mocking the idea that it had been “made up.” He took a rare shot at the Biden administration only because it shelved its Ministry of Truth and hyper-partisan director. He praised convicted felon Michael Avenatti as a serious contender for the presidency. He complained that “entire media companies essentially exist to tear down Joe Biden.” He speculated that it would “make no sense” to future generations that some opposed the use of the 1619 project in K-12 schools, wondering if it was “whitelash.”
Individually, none of those falsehoods or misleading framings made Stelter remarkable. To the contrary, they made him just another embarrassing Trump-era cable-news talking head.
What did differentiate Stelter however, were the broader contours he drew for his audience. His paranoid rants about the right-wing media machine — almost always emotional appeals, rather than forensic investigations into the facts — helped his progressive audience feel secure in their own prejudgements, imbuing them with a sense of unearned victimhood and righteousness.
Outside of the confines of monomaniacal outlets like CNN, Stelter warned, were opinions and interpretations that were not just different, but wrong, and even dangerous. He had surveyed the conservative media ecosphere — or at least had claimed to — so that his audience didn’t have to, and it was not good.
Of course, Stelter hadn’t really spent much time doing his homework. He didn’t engage honestly with the reporting of outlets like National Review, the Washington Free Beacon, or the New York Post. He scanned Twitter for the latest Tucker Carlson clip to make the rounds. Boom! Stelter’s next monologue had already all but been written for him.
In a world where the bulk of the press is fiercely, dogmatically liberal, Stelter convinced his liberal audience that they were under siege, making them feel like a rebel band of truth-seekers battling against a behemoth. His audience could keep eating up what he and his colleagues were feeding them — the equivalent of a diet only of candy and soda — and be at peace knowing that they were getting the truth. There was no need to double check when your information was coming from reliable sources.
Brian Stelter purported to work toward making the media better. But really, his project left news consumers worse off.
Headline Fail of the Week
The New York Times published an article on “How a Storied Phrase Became a Partisan Battleground,” in which reporter Jazmine Ulloa claims, “A touchstone of political and social discourse, the nearly 100-year-old phrase ‘the American dream,’ is being repurposed — critics say distorted — particularly by Republicans of color.”
The article says that “a new crop of Republican candidates and elected officials are using the phrase in a different way, invoking the same promise but arguing in speeches, ads and mailings that the American dream is dying or in danger, threatened by what they see as rampant crime, unchecked illegal immigration, burdensome government regulations and liberal social policies,” and notes that many of the Republicans doing so are people of color, “including immigrants and the children of immigrants, for whom the phrase first popularized in 1931 has a deep resonance.”
In what is perhaps the most insane line in a deeply flawed article, Ulloa claims that “in the same way that many Trump supporters have tried to turn the American flag into an emblem of the right, so too have these Republicans sought to claim the phrase as their own, repurposing it as a spinoff of the Make America Great Again slogan.”
The piece ultimately quotes a political-science professor from Fordham University who claims Republicans are using the phrase as a “dog whistle.”
“They are saying here is the potential of what you can have, if we can exclude others from ‘stealing it’ from you,” said professor Christina Greer.
Media Misses
– While interviewing former Indiana governor Mitch Daniels, Politico’s Adam Wren asked Daniels if his criticism of the use of Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States in K-12 classrooms was a forebear of “the GOP’s current fixation on the so-called ‘woke curriculum.’”
Was Daniels sowing the seeds of a cultural civil war by expressing discontent with the use of an explicitly ideological textbook?
– The New York Times recently hired former Buzzfeed News investigative reporter Ken Bensinger to “pioneer a new beat covering right-wing media as part of the democracy team on the Politics desk.”
A spokesperson for the paper told Fox News: “Our media and technology desks thoroughly cover many aspects of hyper-partisan media and misinformation (when relevant). The Politics desk created a new beat on this topic because many Americans rely solely on right-wing media for their information, which often bears little resemblance to what is being reported in mainstream media. We want our readers to be informed about what is driving the political decisions of many Americans.”
However, the spokesperson did not respond to a question from Fox about whether the paper has or plans to create a position to cover left-wing media.