The Media Research Center’s freakouts over Brian Stelter continued in a Feb. 5 column by Tim Graham:
Brian Stelter is back in his CNN comfort zone, penning those punchy sentences about “Trump’s history of bullying media companies.” It’s as if he cannot conceive of the opposing view, as in “the legacy media’s history of bullying Donald Trump.” They’ve played rough — seeking to destroy his political career, bankrupt his businesses, and even put him in jail for years.
CNN’s nightmare came true, and Trump overcame massive media bullying to win another term in the White House. Now the Stelters of the world desperately want the media to keep its bullying spirit strong. This includes fighting Trump in court instead of settling.
On February 2, CNN touted Stelter’s quote from an anonymous CBS correspondent who doesn’t want CBS to surrender to Trump’s lawyers and provide a full transcript of their softball “60 Minutes” interview with Kamala Harris from October. The quote was “Trump’s lawsuit was a joke but if we settle, we become a laughingstock.”
Just as Stelter generously awarded anonymity to all the leftists burrowed inside Fox News, he’s now granting safety to leftists inside CBS who think the brass are never anti-Trump enough. The sources are persistently anonymous because CNN loves these leftist hot takes.
Graham didn’t explain how it’s “leftist” to fight a lawsuit by a Republican president bent on retribution and can’t identify any damages he suffered. Graham continued to whine that Stelter was, you know, covering the media:
But overall, Stelter lined up Trump’s new press policies – shuffling media work spaces at the Pentagon, the FCC questioning NPR and PBS, “the government deleting [Democrat] web pages full of valuable data,” and “the White House deriding real news stories as hoaxes.” He said it’s all designed to say only Trump can be trusted.
Stelter faced no opponent on CNN to rebut him, especially on that last “hoaxes” bit. In the first Trump term, CNN aggressively promoted the Russian collusion hoax for years, and Stelter loved fervent Trump opponent Michael Avenatti so much he buttered him up as a plausible presidential candidate. That didn’t turn out to be a “real news story.” Avenatti went to jail.
Graham offered no opponent to rebut Stelter or prove anything he said to be wrong, and it’s weird that he can’t stop referencing the very old news of Avenatti.
Jorge Bonilla huffed in a Feb. 13 post that Stelter pointed out to MRC-fave right-winger Scott Jennings that while Trump hold more media availabilities than President Biden did, he also lies a lot:
Stelter went to the “but Trump lies” card after Jennings wrecked him on transparency, and he has a point. President Donald Trump has likely had more Resolute Desk press conferences than Joe Biden has had press conferences. And unlike Biden, Trump does not require cue cards with the journalist’s name, image, outlet, and question.
Alex Christy raged in an April 15 post that Stelter ran to the defense of NPR and PBS:
For the Tax Day edition of CNN’s Inside Politics on Tuesday, media correspondent Brian Stelter joined host Dana Bash to allege that President Trump wants to defund PBS and NPR for “simply covering the news.” If Stelter really believes that then he has a funny definition of what is newsworthy.
Of course, any media segment about defunding public broadcasting has to include a good deal of fearmongering and Stelter saw no reason for this one to be any different:
[…]Bash acted as if that was the most profound argument she had ever heard, “Yeah, that is such a good point.”
When Stelter pointed out that NPR and PBS are being punished by the Trump administration for “simply covering the news,” Fondacaro insisted that transgender people aren’t newsworthy, particularly whining about “an entire movie celebrating a transgender teenager’s so-called ‘changing gender identity’”:
Not a segment profiling a transgender teenager, an entire movie. What news value to “genderqueer dinosaur enthusiasts” or Lil Miss Hot Mess have? And that is before we get to non-transgender related examples like NPR’s 2020 “the racial origins of fat phobia.”
Fondacaro refused to explain why that last thing was not newsworthy.
Graham returned to whine in an April 23 post that Stelter called Trump’s war on PBS and NPR an autocratic move:
President Trump’s backing of a rescission of more than $1 billion in advance funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting is freaking out the leftist media. On Saturday night, CNN media reporter Brian Stelter smeared the effort as “right out of the autocratic playbook.” The Left will be the heroes if “there are pro-democracy coalitions that are stronger than the wannabe autocrat.”
On CNN Newsroom in the 7 pm hour, anchor Jessica Dean first asked about the Trump White House taking the wire services out of the daily press-pool rotation, so AP and Reuters have less daily access. Stelter claimed “the bigger picture is very clear. The Trump White House wants fewer skeptical reporters and more sycophants. They want a lot fewer hardballs.” But the “good news” is that CNN and ABC and NBC are “still asking the tough questions.”
Left unsaid: did CNN and the rest ask the “hardballs” when Obama and Biden were in the White House? Or were they “sycophants”?
Funny how Graham throws around biased and inaccurate terms like “leftist media” while refusing to properly and accurately identify right-wing media like Fox News. Still, he whined:
It is NOT autocratic to advocate for defunding that sound like State-Run Radio and State-Run TV (when Democrats rule). It is autocratic to take our money and smear us with it. And CNN’s MJ Lee sounded autocratic in her demands to run the conservatives out of the national discourse.
Those Republicans were supporting an attempted insurrection against the government because Trump was emotionally incapable of accepting that he lost an election. Why does Graham think people like that deserve to participate in the national discourse?