There were joyful conga lines inside the Media Research Center palatial suburban Washington, D.C., offices when Brian Stelter lost his job at CNN — but it still couldn’t be satisfied, as the MRC’s Stelter Derangement Syndrome continued to linger, prompting whining and meltdowns every time he appeared on TV elsewhere. Then Stelter got the last laugh career-wise, prompting Nicholas Fondacaro to have a whole new meltdown in a Sept. 3 post:
You read that correctly. The liberal media’s janitor, Brian Stelter will be returning to CNN two years after being canned amid network-wide shake ups under the leadership of since-ousted boss Chris Licht. That’s according to a Tuesday scoop by Stelter’s former CNN media beat buddy Dylan Byers, and later confirmed by Stelter on X and in a post from the resurrected Reliable Sources Newsletter.
“Two years after his termination from CNN, former host and media correspondent Brian Stelter is returning to the network full time, per reliable sources. Formal announcement expected tomorrow. (Or today now!),” Byers wrote on X.
Stelter announced the news on X, saying they created a new title just for him and he would be resurrecting the Reliable Sources Newsletter after his former flunky, Oliver Darcy abruptly left the network in the beginning of August (possibly over Stelter’s imminent re-hiring):
[…]It’s worth noting that Stelter’s former title was “chief media correspondent,” which gave the false impression he was just journalist, meanwhile he used his show (so-called Reliable Sources) to spout his left-wing political opinions and defend the media’s biased reporting against conservatives and Republicans. The shift to “analyst” was a more fitting of an opinion peddler.
We would remind Fondacaro that the name of his employer gives the false impression that it actually cares about “media research” and is something other than the partisan right-wing oppo-research organization he actually is — which means there’s ample opportunity to be a language purist in-house before lashing out at others. The fact that the MRC can’t stop calling Darcy “Farcy Darcy” is another sign it cares more about pushing partisan venom than conduction legitimate “media research.”
Tim Graham followed with more Stelter derangement the next day:
Amid the less-than-shocking news that post-Chris Licht CNN is bringing Brian Stelter back as “Chief Media Analyst,” we at NewsBusters insist that the sequel Stelter 2: Electric Boogaloo be accompanied by some small measure of repentance. In his first “Reliable” newsletter of his second term, Stelter wrote “[t]he media industry has matured, CNN has evolved, and I have changed a lot since I signed off two years ago.”
Does anyone expect a different Stelter? If he’s “changed a lot,” he should confess all of the remarkable arrogance that made him the poster boy of the philosophy that leftist tilt is mandatory, and at the same time, crusading anti-Trump journalists are somehow not on “one side of the aisle.” Here’s a small list. Yes, it could on a long, long time….
What actually followed with a laundry list of tired right-wing grievances (Michael Avenatti? Really?) and more whining that Stelter wouldn’t accept the Hunter Biden laptop story at face value even though it was peddled by pro-Trump cronies, published by a right-wing anti-Biden rag, and no verification was provided at the time.
After that, surprisingly, the MRC managed to restrain itself from lashing out at Stelter for more than a month. Brad Wilmouth wrote in an Oct. 16 post under the sneering headline “Who Missed Brian?”:
Appearing on CNN News Central on Tuesday morning, CNN chief media analyst Brian Stelter talked up former Joint Chiefs Chairman Mark Milley calling Donald Trump a “fascist to the core” in a book by Washington Post editor Bob Woodward, and mused over the possibility that Democrat Kamala Harris might try to draw attention to the attack during her interview with Fox News host Bret Baier.
They underlined this on screen: “WOODWARD BOOK: MILLEY CALLED TRUMP ‘FASCIST TO THE CORE.” They loved it.
CNN host Sara Sidner brought up Woodward’s new book, War, as she posed: “You have read Bob Woodward’s new book that is out this morning, and in it, he has this quote where Mark Milley calls Trump a ‘fascist.’ You’ve read the book. Can you put this in some context for us and give us some idea of all that is in the book, named War?“
Stelter declared that Milley is sending a “chilling message” about the former President:
Wilmouth did not dispute the accuracy of anything in Milley’s or Woodward’s books.
The next day, it was Alex Christy’s turn to whine about Stelter, this time for pointing out that Fox News’ Bret Baier did his employer’s bidding with his hostile interview of Kamala Harris:
CNN chief media correspondent Brian Stelter joined The Source host Kaitlan Collins on Wednesday to react to Vice President Kamala Harris’s interview with Fox News’s Bret Baier. Stelter tied himself into a rhetorical pretzel as he tried to simultaneously claim that Baier is basically “a Trump surrogate,” but also that “adversarial interviews are a good thing.”
Collins began by trying to figure out how well Harris did, “Not that Twitter’s real life ever, but looking at it, it seemed like a Rorschach test, right from the beginning. Of how people were going to see. Did she crush it? Did she blow it? What was the outcome of the interview?”
Stelter didn’t have anything to say on that front. Instead, he went straight to the Fox bashing, “I think Trump refused to debate Kamala Harris again. So, Harris did the next best thing. She booked a debate on Fox News, and that’s what this was tonight.”
He continued, “She essentially walked into a Trump campaign field office. Because anchor Bret Baier, who is a solid journalist, he is also incredibly sympathetic to Trump, because that’s what his fans want. That’s what his viewers want. His viewers want him to represent the Trump point of view. So, it was almost as if you had a Trump surrogate, interviewing Kamala Harris.”
Speaking of viewers, Stelter acknowledged Baier is “a solid journalist,” but he couldn’t just say that because his CNN viewers can’t accept that a non-caricaturized version of Fox.
Christy didn’t dispute anything Stelter said — then again, his readers would not accept a non-caricaturized version of Stelter.
Curtis Houck was more than happy to stick to the caricature, insisting in an Oct. 20 post regarding a panel that included “conservative populist strategist” Ryan Girdusky that “Stelter was screeching in fear about Donald Trump removing CBS from the airwaves if he wins in November.” He claimed that Stelter “screeched” again, then added that “Stelter continued screeching about how Trump’s threats are far worse, completely ignoring Girdusky’s point about spying of then-Fox correspondent James Rosen. But none of the video accompanying Houck’s post depicts anything remotely resembling “screeching” on Stelter’s part. He went on to cheer that Girdusky insulted Stelter:
After Girdusky twice shouted at Stelter that he’s “very privileged,” Singleton uncorked at Stelter and told him to “get out of New York and talk to regular people.”
Stelter scoffed that he doesn’t “live in New York” (he lives in rural New Jersey) and instead “a normal city, in a normal town.”
As Singleton tried to get a word in, Stelter claimed the country, from his perch, is just fin and those saying our roads and schools are in disarray are spewing “anti-America” filth: “[R]oads are not — I love New York — but my roads are not crumbling. My schools don’t suck. I just — I just get tired of the anti-America rhetoric.”
Singleton really let Stelter have it by schooling him on how many people are all but trapped in poverty with horrific environments[.] […]
Phillip eventually stepped in and tried to right the ship for her friend Stelter with the argument that “what Shermichael is saying, I mean, that is — the point that you’re making, Trump has taken that mantle up, but it used to be, to be honest, the Democrats were the ones saying, let’s get out of these wars…Let’s invest in America and inner cities.”
Girdusky, if you’ll recall, is the nasty piece of work who got himself banned from CNN by falsely portraying host Mehdi Hasan as a terrorist and claiming that “I hope your beeper doesn’t go off.” That’s the level of partisan political discourse Houck wants to see — though he would fly into a rage if a liberal stooped to that level.