Does Brian Stelter Read the Right-Wing Media He Spends So Much Time Demonizing?

Welcome back to “Forgotten Fact-Checks,” a weekly column produced by National Review’s News Desk. This week, we examine whether Brian Stelter — CNN’s chief media correspondent — consumes the right-wing media he’s constantly demonizing, reflect on the Biden administration’s suggestion of a security partnership with the Taliban, and highlight more media misses.

We’re Right over Here, Brian

There was a lot to take note of in a monologue delivered by the aforementioned Stelter on Sunday, and none of it spoke well of the Reliable Sources host.

With the chyron “Here’s what everyone gets wrong about trust in media” emblazoned beneath him, Stelter insisted that “everyone is a member of the media now” before going on to draw a distinction between “reporters and repeaters.” The latter group is, according to Stelter, composed of “talk-radio shouters who tell listeners to hate the other side.” His description was accompanied by B-roll from Fox News and other right-leaning outlets.

Reporters, he explained, are “paid to figure out what is true, not what they might want to be true.” Naturally, the B-roll for this portion of Stelter’s diatribe came from CNN and MSNBC. Nevertheless, he asserted that “this isn’t about ideology or anything, it’s about a type of content.”

He went on to ask, “why is it that right-wing media outlets do so little reporting? Why do they employ so few reporters. . . . Why isn’t there a New York Times of the Right?”

These are all interesting questions; the first two because they’re based on a false premise, and the last because it’s based on a true one. It’s not that conservative outlets don’t do any reporting, it’s that Stelter doesn’t care to pay attention to the reporting that they do. The Washington Examiner, Washington Free Beacon, The Dispatch, the New York Post, and Fox News all do plenty of reporting. But as a test case, let’s look at just National Review’s output.

Over the course of the last week alone, National Review — which was founded as a commentary-centric publication  — reported on the faulty ground on which the Department of Justice’s memo on school-board protests stands, the blatant hypocrisy of Virginia gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe, and the experiences of Afghan interpreters left behind by the Biden administration.

We’ve been at the forefront of reporting on the coronavirus lab-leak theory — which was summarily dismissed by most in the mainstream media that Stelter praises — confirmed unflattering reports about former president Donald Trump, and debunked vicious lies about Border Patrol agents — lies being propagated by President Joe Biden.

Perhaps Stelter is genuinely unaware of these efforts (among so many more), or perhaps he’s aware and doesn’t want to acknowledge them because he’s paid to tell people what they want to be true, rather than what is true. His reaction to the New York Post‘s report on Hunter Biden’s laptop in the run-up to the 2020 election last October suggests it may be the latter.

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.

Credit Stelter for his implicit acknowledgement that the Times is of the Left, though. That at least made for a rare moment of honest insight.

Our Allies, the Taliban

In a speech delivered on August 31, President Biden made a point of referring to the terrorist group ISIS-K as “sworn enemies of the Taliban.”

The next day, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Miley, said it was “possible” that the U.S. would collaborate with the Taliban in fighting ISIS-K.

These comments were part of a broader Biden administration-led effort to pretend that the United States’ withdrawal from Afghanistan was not the disaster it appeared to be. Perhaps the Taliban would make fine allies in the global war on terror!

That pipe dream has been smashed by Taliban spokesman Suhail Shaheen, who made it plain to the Associated Press that his band of Islamic extremists would not participate in the kind of security partnership teased by the Biden administration. It’s either an embarrassing indictment of the administration that it believed such a thing to be possible, or an insult to Americans’ intelligence that the administration tried to make them believe it was imminent.

Headline Fail of the Week

This week’s dishonor is presented to “Anybody Fighting Joe Biden Is Helping Trump’s Next Coup,” a Jonathan Chait column for New York Magazine. The column claims that “all Republican politics is now functionally authoritarian.”

Many social-media users were quick to note that Chait authored a column in February 2016 arguing, “Why Liberals Should Support a Trump Republican Nomination.”

Media Misses

–The New York Times’ Apoorva Mandavilli overstated the number of American children hospitalized with COVID-19 by 837,000 cases last Wednesday. Mandavilli can add that to her highlight reel, which includes a tweet insisting that the lab-leak theory is “racist.”

-The Times also published an article that called New York City’s program for gifted and talented students “racially segregated.” There is no basis for such a claim. Students of all races are welcome in the program, and those who become a part of it are not separated by race within it.

-Jonathan Chait continued his hot streak by labeling National Review’s Dan McLaughlin an “anti-anti-Trumper” guilty of “​​play[ing] down the right’s obvious lies about 2020″ during an argument over the 2000 election. It’s an interesting accusation to make of the author of a column entitled “Convict and Disqualify Trump.”

–Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin claimed last week that the preliminary injunction from a federal district court blocking the enforcement of “Texas’s abortion bounty law” was a “rare win” for the Justice Department and abortion rights groups. NR’s Alexandra DeSanctis said it best: “They literally do nothing but win in court, Jennifer.”