Consider the types of people he would book on his show to inform his viewers. He sought to help rehabilitate the ousted newscaster Dan Rather, the man who did more to discredit the mainstream media with his false 2004 story on George W. Bush than anyone else in this country’s history. He was also a key promoter of Michael Avenatti, the lawyer who sued Trump on behalf of the president’s former one-night stand, Stormy Daniels. Stelter literally urged Avenatti on-air to run for president. Avenatti is now serving time in federal prison for attempting to extort money from his clients. And when Stelter included “scholars” and “experts” on his show to bolster criticism of Trump, their tone mirrored Stelter’s own special brand of Trump hyperbole: A former Duke University psychiatry professor claimed in 2019 that “Trump is as destructive a person in this century as Hitler, Stalin, and Mao were in the last century. He may be responsible for many more million deaths than they were.”
Rather than engage in criticism of his own industry (at least, the nonconservative segment of it), he took to chiding CNN viewers for failing to appreciate the existential importance of his employer. “I don’t want to sound—tell me if this is too grandiose,” he said on a podcast. “The world and the country are better off when CNN is strong, and when brands like CNN are strong.”
Yet one of the reasons viewers were losing trust in outlets like CNN was that during the Trump years, those outlets abandoned any pretense of objectivity and instead embraced partisan bias as mission critical. By the end of his show’s run, with Trump out of the White House, Stelter was reduced to offering on-air recaps and manufactured outrage about the previous week’s offerings on CNN competitor Fox News, with special ire reserved for Tucker Carlson (whose show remains the most-watched on cable).
No wonder Stelter spent his final weeks at CNN indulging in a parade of platitudes and self-regard rather than critical reflection. “It was a rare privilege to lead a weekly show focused on the press at a time when it has never been more consequential,” he told NPR, noting how grateful he was for having the chance to cover “the media, truth, and the stories that shape our world.”
However, Stelter continues to fail upward, Stephen Miller writes: Great news: Brian Stelter got a gig at Harvard. “The media-to-classroom pipeline will simply strengthen the ideological bubble that led to Stelter’s dismissal from CNN in the first place. Yet what Stelter’s lectures won’t offer is introspection as to how we got to this so-called precipice of democracy. What was the media’s role in leading us here (for instance, the $5 billion in free media given to Donald Trump in 2016 by journalists like Stelter and his former boss)? What plan do they have to correct their course (as opposed to simply slandering 50 percent of the voting public)? At least Stelter will finally be able to acknowledge what anyone who’s watched him has realized instantly: that he was never an honest and objective media reporter.”