BRIAN STELTER’S HOT TAKE ON ABC/EPSTEIN STORY IS EVERYTHING WRONG WITH JOURNALISM AND MEDIA ‘FIREFIGHTERS’ TODAY: “Tuesday’s video clip caused widespread outrage, particularly on the right, with many commentators using it to stoke hatred of the media writ large,” Stelter wrote in his newsletter last night.

Just to review: ABC News’ public face is George Stephanopoulos, the former communications director for Bill Clinton. In 2015, Stephanopoulos donated $75,000 to the Clinton Foundation, which the Sunlight Foundation has described as a “slush fund for the Clintons.” Which Jeffrey Epstein claimed he co-founded in a 2007 letter “written by high-powered lawyers Alan Dershowitz and Gerald Lefcourt.” Court documents “obtained by Fox News in 2016 showed that Clinton took at least 26 trips flying aboard Epstein’s private jet, known as the ‘Lolita Express,’ and apparently ditched his Secret Service detail on some of the excursions.” The New York Times reported in July that “A strange thing happened when Jeffrey Epstein came back to New York City after being branded a sex offender: His reputation appeared to rise. In 2010, the year after he got out of a Florida prison, Katie Couric and George Stephanopoulos dined at his Manhattan mansion with a British royal.”

Yesterday, after O’Keefe’s video dropped, featuring ABC’s Amy Robach complaining that management spiked her 2016 story on Epstein and Clinton, David Harsanyi wrote “ABC’s Excuse for Failing to Report on Jeffrey Epstein Makes Absolutely No Sense.” Three years ago, “Bill Clinton’s wife was in the midst of her presidential run. One imagines that a story detailing her husband’s vacations to a pedophile’s island retreat might have been newsworthy. By the way, has Robach wrapped up that reporting on Clinton, yet?”

So of course, “CNN’s self-styled media firefighter Brian Stelter” goes with the “Republicans pounce!” angle.