The Media Research Center has always been hostile to Brian Stelter, which didn’t stop when he left CNN a couple years ago even though there was no reason to continue hostilities. When he returned to CNN last year, that hostility unsurprisingly grew. Jorge Bonilla served up more pre-election whining about Stelter in an Oct. 29 post:
CNN’s very own Anderson Cooper and newly-rehired Brian Stelter got together and, in an exchange devoid of fundamental self-awareness, chided Jeff Bezos for pulling the plug on endorsements at The Washington Post. The two went right to the line of accusing Bezos of improprieties, with a hysterical Stelter suggesting that this is the beginning of autocracy.
[…]It is interesting that Stelter gets trotted out to talk about compliance here. STELTER, of all people, who did everything demanded of him by Jeff Zucker, no matter how ridiculous and over the top, which contributed in no small part to the absolute cratering of CNN’s ratings, which continues to this day.
That cratering bolsters the Bezos argument that underlies this segment, which is that no one trusts the media anymore. To put a finer point on it, people no longer trust the Regime Media.
Needless to say, Bonilla offers no actual evidence that Stelter is the sole, or even primary, cause of CNN’s ratings issue — the MRC is all about kicking Stelter around whether or not it’s warranted.
Meanwhile, the MRC is obligated to defend everything Donald Trump does and denigrate any dissenting opinion, which is what Tim Graham did with a Nov. 1 post over Trump’s stunt lawsuit against CNN, screeching that teh sources Stelter cited were “Lefty ‘First Amendment Experts'”:
The liberal papers and TV networks are not rushing to cover Donald Trump’s $10 billion lawsuit against CBS for its dishonest clip job of their Kamala Harris interview on 60 Minutes. They most likely consider it a stunt like riding in a garbage truck, as Trump trying to refocus attention on CBS sketchily refusing to release a full transcript.
In his “Reliable Sources” newsletter on Friday, Brian Stelter noted (without mentioning CBS) that Harris did a “pull-aside” interview with NBC’s Yamiche Alcindor, seen above. “NBC immediately posted the full transcript.” Why can’t CBS do the same?
But Stelter covered Trump’s suit as a First Amendment threat: “1A experts trash Trump’s CBS suit.”
Graham didn’t prove that the experts Stelter cited were motivated solely because of alleged “lefty” bias.
Graham’s Nov. 15 column lashed out Stelter’s post-election analysis:
Stelter said one anchor texted him that while the media speculated about “Trump amnesia,” as in forgetting “the chaos and Covid missteps of his first term.” They said “voters DID remember. They just remembered different parts of the Trump presidency.”
That’s a crucial distinction. Many Trump voters think the Democrats and the bureaucrats made a lot of “Covid missteps,” but the media have been remarkably uninterested in re-evaluating that. The “chaos” was real, but it was perennially exaggerated by the press trying to tear the administration apart and get appointees to quit or get sacked.
This anonymous source added that “unconscious bias has an impact, when your values and status in life is so different than the majority of Americans.” They are significantly richer than the average American and thus think “the end of democracy” is the biggest issue, so who cares about inflation?
Graham then turned Stelter’s analysis into a platform to peddle his employer’s anti-media narrative:
Voters surely disapproved of rioting at the Capitol. But it was one afternoon, and the Democrats and the press wildly exaggerated it for this entire presidency as something as deadly as 9/11. Voters could sense that reporters were working “aggressively” in the same vein as Biden’s prosecutors and the Pelosi-picked panel on January 6. The objective wasn’t just “accountability,” it was the Democratic Party at work. It was a crusade to drive Trump out of politics altogether and create a blue wave.
Many voters saw through all of this, noticing that the talking points of Democrat social-media accounts and the “news judgment” of the liberal media match very neatly. They felt they were not watching “news.” It’s more like a perpetual advertisement, the endless drumming of a partisan narrative.
One of Stelter’s anonymous journalists asked why “stick around” when “the demonization of the media will continue.” But they routinely fail to realize that the demonization of their opponents is their daily bread and Brie cheese.
Just like the MRC’s partisan demonization of Stelter and anyone else who’s not as right-wing as they are is the fuel it runs on.
The MRC capped its 2024 Stelter-bashing with the year-end space-filler award presentation that included that annual “Brian Stelter Award for Worst Quote of the Year” — which the MRC had to remake from the “Brian Stelter Memorial Award” with Stelter’s return to CNN. There was still no explanation of why the award is named after him in the first place, though.