Brian Stelter

 ABC managed to take a book full of juicy gossip about the morning show wars and ignore all the interesting information. Good Morning America's Dan Harris on Tuesday talked to Brian Stelter, author of Top of the Morning. Yet, Harris spent more time talking about the rise of Stelter, offering such dull questions of the author as "Do you ever sleep?" and "What made you pick this subject for your book?"

Perhaps Harris didn't want to talk about how Stelter quoted an NBC executive deriding the "the crap on ‘G.M.A.'" In the book, the writer condescendingly described the ABC program: "The cast was more bubbly and the stories more gossip-laden. And short: If you didn't like what they were covering, you could just wait 45 seconds and the cast would be on to a Chihuahua playing pool." Harris made no mention of the upheaval at NBC after Ann Curry's removal from the Today show.

Brian Stelter, media reporter for the New York Times, foisted his peculiar news judgment on Fox News, weighing President Obama's petulant remarks after the defeat of his gun control plans as more newsworthy than a fire at a Texas fertilizer plant that has killed at least 12 people and injured up to 200.

Stelter also sounded offended that Fox cut off Obama's live Rose Garden remarks, in his piece on the front of Friday's Business section: "At Fox News, Less Attention Paid to Gun Debate Than Elsewhere."

Looks like this could be a rocky transition for Ed Schultz and MSNBC.

Ever since Politico reported "The Ed Show" would move from primetime weeknights on MSNBC to the network's barren weekends, bumping up against scarcely watched programming that consists mainly of reality shows set in prison, Schultz has insisted the shift is not a demotion. (Audio clips after page break)

New York Times media reporter Brian Stelter's Friday story -- adapted from a longer post on his "Media Decoder" blog -- relayed the changing of the prime time guard at the nation's most liberal news channel: "Weekend Host Chris Hayes to Take Over 8 P.M. Slot on MSNBC." Stelter praised Hayes for his "well-regarded morning program," crediting it for "long, thoughtful conversations about politics and public policy," though conservatives would question how deep that surface sheen of sophistication truly is.

Chris Hayes will take over the 8 p.m. time slot on MSNBC in the next month, the Comcast owned channel announced on Thursday, the day after the current host of that hour, Ed Schultz, said he was moving from the weekdays to the weekends.

The New York Times finally noticed what Washington has obsessed over the last few days -- the dust-up between veteran Washington Post investigative reporter Bob Woodward and the Obama White House over an email from a White House aide (apparently Gene Sperling, director of the National Economic Council) who emailedhis disagreement with Woodward's characterization that the White House had moved the goalposts regarding the sequester: "I think you will regret staking out that claim."

Woodward told CNN's Wolf Blitzer he considered that a veiled threat. Yet his fellow journalists at the Times (as opposed to "conservatives") have now followed most of the mainstream media in taking the side of the government.

Are you tired of having to go to YouTube to watch video of terrorists killing U.S. soldiers? Do you get annoyed when slow download speeds interrupt hearing your favorite Islamist cleric call for infidel blood to restore the Caliphate? Wish you could see suicide bombers lovingly read their last statements in crystal-clear HD?

Well, great news, kids! Al “no controlling legal authority” Gore is selling his far-left vanity network, Current TV, to Al Jazeera – the anti-western terror mouthpiece bank-rolled by the emir of Qatar.

According to the New York Times' Brian Stelter, Al Jazeera is about to acquire Al Gore's ultra-leftist and low-rated cable outlet Current TV. Stelter reported: "If the deal is completed, Current will provide the pan-Arab news giant with something it has sought for years: a pathway into American living rooms."

However, the move may not mean a complete overhaul for Current TV as Al Jazeera may retain some staffers but the very small number of regular viewers should expect to see a lineup change. According to Stelter the channel's "schedule of shows will most likely be dissolved in the spring."

Ed Schultz's lofty opinion that he's indispensable at MSNBC is apparently not widely shared at 30 Rockefeller Center.

Schultz responded angrily on his radio show yesterday to a New York Times story about the network that contained an eye-opening disclosure close to the end of the piece (audio clips after page break).

With Barack Obama's victory Tuesday, Americans are in for more puff pieces about the so-called "news network" MSNBC which sings his praises 24/7 while omitting or dishonestly spinning all of his failures.

Doing his part Monday was the New York Times' Brian Stelter who in the midst of dribbling all over one of the biggest jokes on television actually said the following (readers are advised to remove all fluids and flammables from computer proximity while making sure there's absolutely nothing in their mouths):

Wednesday's banner New York Times headline on the second presidential debate was studiously neutral: "Obama and Romney Mount Biting Attacks in Debate Rematch." Jim Rutenberg and Jeff Zeleny's underlying report played it straight, as did Peter Baker in his front-page "news analysis," under the punchy headline "Punch, Punch, Punch."

But while the Obama cheerleading was muted in print, Times journalists let their slant show during live fact-check of the debate, and especially on the TimesCast. Baker wrote for Wednesday's edition:

New York Times media reporter Brian Stelter got huffy in a Friday  blog post on behalf of his fellow liberal journalists, who took to Twitter en masse, aghast at the audacity of a reporter from a conservative news site interrupting President Obama's Rose Garden speech outlining his controversial new immigration policy (a version of Stelter's story also made it into print on Saturday).

The Times was kinder to an Iraqi journalist who hurled a shoe at President Bush during a December 2008 press conference in Baghdad, emphasizing his "defiant act" and "hero status" in Iraq.

Brian Stelter at The New York Times reports MSNBC's 4 pm host, Dylan Ratigan, is quitting as of June 22, and his hour will be taken over by Martin Bashir. Staff on the Bashir show will try to create a new 3 pm template. "The channel may try out an ensemble of hosts and contributors at that hour." An ensemble...together...like a ripoff of The Five? After all, that started as a place-holder.

“Once you’ve said your piece, you can either keep saying it — and then it’s a job, good job, pays well, everybody knows your name, it’s great — or you can decide what you’re going to do about it,” Ratigan said. “And the answer is, I don’t know. But I do know, in order to figure it out, I have to dismount.”

Brian Stelter's media reporting for the New York Times slants to the left, but even he seemed to acknowledge that the mainstream press is strongly supportive of gay marriage in a May 10 blog post:

For years, conservative media critics have asserted that many mainstream journalists favor gay marriage and tilt their coverage of the topic accordingly. On MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” on Thursday, Mark Halperin of Time magazine seemed to agree. “The media is as divided on this issue as the Obama family -- which is to say not at all,” he said. “And so he’s never going to get negative coverage for this.”

New York Times media reporter Brian Stelter was the latest to downplay Obama-supporter Hilary Rosen's insult of Ann Romney of having "never worked a day in her life," in his Sunday Review "news analysis," "From Flash to Fizzle." Stelter argued that Hilary Rosen's insult would be the latest controversy to burn hot and then be totally forgotten:

New York Times media reporter Brian Stelter wrote a column for Wednesday's Business section on the "offensive figure" Rush Limbaugh ("After Apology, National Advertisers Are Still Shunning Limbaugh") on the radio host losing advertisers after his "slut" comment on birth-control activist Sandra Fluke was inflamed by the left.

But the Times has thus far ignored the counterexample raised by conservatives of comedian and HBO "Real Time" host Bill Maher, who used a far more vile word to describe Republican Sarah Palin in March 2011. (The word's very offensiveness makes it unprintable, unlike Limbaugh's comment, a standard of obscenity that actually shields Maher.)

New York Times media reporter Brian Stelter on Monday defended Hollywood and the new HBO movie "Game Change," a hit job on the 2008 vice presidential campaign of Sarah Palin based on the book by liberal reporters John Heilemann and Mark Halperin. In "Rogue, Rube or G.O.P. Star: Portraying Palin," Stelter defended Hollywood from "conspiracy theories" that the movie is meant "to undermine a future run for president by Ms. Palin" (as if Hollywood liberals wouldn't love to have it accomplish just that).

Stelter also vigorously defended the movie-makers choice to focus solely on Palin at the expense of the portions of the book devoted to the bloody Democratic primary tussle between Democrats Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. But it doesn't take a conspiracy theorist to realize that overwhelmingly liberal and Democratic movie-makers would prefer the "Palin is an ignoramus" parts, rather than the parts that might have made Hillary and Obama look petty.

New York Times media editor Bruce Headlam was less than gracious after the sudden death of conservative media activist Andrew Breitbart, citing in a Times webcast “his willingness to push the limits of what he saw as journalism, what a lot of other people saw as just stunts and demagoguery.”

Media reporter Jeremy Peters wrote the official Times obituary Friday for Breitbart, who died suddenly at age 43 after collapsing while walking outside his home in Los Angeles: “Andrew Breitbart, Conservative Blogger, Dies at 43.” As a news story it was balanced, but compared to the usual Times obituary it was certainly critical, starting in the third paragraph:

The front page of Monday’s Business Day featured New York Times media reporter Brian Stelter’s oh-so-respectful profile of MSNBC’s newest left-wing host, Melissa Harris-Perry (she also teaches at Tulane University, which impresses Stelter and the Times enormously): “At MSNBC, A Professor As TV Host.”

Harris-Perry is not just another MSNBC host but will soon become, in Stelter’s phrase, “the only tenured professor in the United States -- and one of a very small number of African-American women -- who serves as a cable news host.” Stelter even found time to suck up to another liberal host, Rachel Maddow, “a Rhodes scholar...lauded for her long, carefully argued essays.” Stelter also insisted cable TV now contains "pockets of intellectual stimulation that did not exist a decade ago." Which all just happen to reside on the liberal network MSNBC.

Stelter has a history of hiding the radicalism of leftists while bashing conservatives, as in his sympathetic treatment of leftist academic Frances Fox Piven and excoriation of Piven critic Glenn Beck.

Some of the worst bias from the New York Times over the past month:

Surging GOPers “Are to Varying Degrees Yahoos”

“The candidates who surged before [Gingrich] are to varying degrees yahoos. They proved it anew last week. Michele Bachmann seemed to be under the impression that we had an embassy in Iran, and Rick Perry was definitely under the delusion that the voting age in this country is 21 instead of 18.” – Former White House correspondent, now columnist Frank Bruni, December 4.

Herman Cain “Seems Like Someone Who ...Has Never Opened a Newspaper”

“Let us pause here to make a necessarily severe assessment: to say that Herman Cain has an imperfect grasp of policy would be unfair not only to George W. Bush in 1999 but also to Britney Spears in 1999. Herman Cain seems like someone who, quite frankly, has never opened a newspaper.” –T.A. Frank in the November 13 edition of the Times Sunday Magazine.

New York Times media reporter Brian Stelter may have let his personal views color his enthusiastic reception of the popularity of Occupy Wall Street’s “99 percent” motif, but he was right that it is cropping up in a lot of places these days, especially among liberal activists. It has certainly sunken into the collective consciousness of New York Times journalists.

One prominent example: The front page of Monday’s Times featured a story by William Broad on affluent tourists taking trips on a mini submarine for a view of the Titanic, “Plunging Deep (in Pockets) to See Titanic at 100.”

On Thursday’s front page, New York Times media reporter Brian Stelter produced another homage to Occupy Wall Street, this time their slogan:“Camps Are Cleared, but ‘99 Percent’ Still Occupies the Lexicon.”(Thanks in no small part to fawning reporters like Stelter and others at the Times.) Part of his evidence? Google searches and an opposition blog that had not been updated in two whole weeks.

New York Times media reporter Brian Stelter was in St. Petersburg, Fla., but that didn’t stop him from marking his media colleague’s burgeoning coverage of the Occupy Wall Street movement for Thursday’s “A News Story Is Growing With ‘Occupy’ Protests.” Stelter hyped the increasing media coverage that the lefty aggregation “Occupy Wall Street” has been granted as it spreads to other cities, including in Florida.

But Stelter wasn’t nearly so accomodating to the conservative Tea Party when it first broke through in early 2009.

New York Times media reporter Brian Stelter marked the 15th anniversary of Fox News on the front of Monday’s Business section with a profile of host Sean Hannity, whose program has been a channel mainstay from the beginning: “Victory Lap for Fox and Hannity.”

Stelter wasn’t hostile, but did use something a guest said on Hannity’s show to accuse Hannity of instigating “inflammatory rhetoric.” But another Stelter story in the same section failed to criticize a left-wing figure, Tavis Smiley, who engages in truly inflammatory rhetoric from a secure public perch at PBS.

Not content with its front-page drumbeat of stories related to the “News of the World” hacking scandal, the New York Times keeps uncovering multiple angles of attack against Rupert Murdoch’s media empire News Corp.

Media reporter Brian Stelter made the front of Wednesday’s Business Day by relaying threats from the hard left – or rather “progressive activists and public interest groups” – that want to break up Murdoch’s right-leaning stable of newspapers and networks: “Scandal Stirs U.S. Debate On Big Media.”

“Page One,” a new documentary about a year in the life of the New York Times directed by Andrew Rossi, is showing at the sleek new Lincoln Center theatre on Manhattan’s Upper West Side for a mere $13. While not openly partisan or even political (there were no Obama stickers spotted on desks, no rants about the paper’s myriad conservative critics), “Page One,” which captures in semi-compellingif scatter-shot fashion a year or so in the life of the Times’s media desk, fits snugly in to the Upper West Side mentality of entitled liberalism.

It’s a running conversation running over with angst, as Times reporters tackle stories about new media while simultaneously pondering the paper’s own place in the rearranged cosmos, as the paper’s very reason for being seems under attack in the age of Facebook, Twitter, and liberal news aggregators like the Huffington Post stealing audience.

President Obama authorized the state of Hawaii to release a copy of his long-form birth certificate, resulting in massive media attention and a front-page splash by New York Times reporter Michael Shear on Thursday, “Citing ‘Silliness,’ Obama Shows Birth Certificate.”

But a Times media reporter wrongly suggested the “Birther” theories only erupted after Obama became president, among conservatives, when in fact they first circulated during the Democratic primaries, stirred up by supporters of Obama rival Hillary Clinton.

In a short video on the New York Times's website, Brian Stelter, the paper's media reporter, comments on the "interesting" trend of cable news reporters "taking sides" in the Wisconsin budget battle - with Fox News on the right and MSNBC on the left, of course - and supposedly twisting facts to fit partisan narratives.

Asked about commentators "looking for a certain narrative on the way in" - even when the facts don't support it - Stelter singled out Bill O'Reilly and Ed Schultz as indicative of the trend. But he needn't look so far from home. The Times's own partisan pugilist, Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman, has consistently twisted facts in an effort to fit the Wisconsin debate into a leftist narrative.

New York Times media reporters Jeremy Peters and Brian Stelter sounded a little defensive in Monday’s Business section story on the political blame game that immediately followed the shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and the killing of six others in Tucson. The confusing headline: “After Tucson, Blanket Accusations Leave Much to Interpretation.”

For every action in politics today, there’s an overwhelming and opposite reaction.

Last week, the reaction came from conservative politicians who bridled at suggestions in the media that Jared L. Loughner may have been influenced by right-wing rhetoric and talk radio when he killed six people and gravely wounded Representative Gabrielle Giffords in a rampage on Jan. 8 in Tucson. In her video address on Wednesday, Sarah Palin said that journalists and pundits should not manufacture “a blood libel that serves only to incite the very hatred and violence that they purport to condemn.”

The question left unanswered: which journalists and pundits?

When conservative radio hosts like Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck take stands against Obama-care or amnesty for illegal immigrants, the New York Times is quick to raise concerns. But certain correct causes and personalities not only get a pass but receive heroic treatment. A prime example is comedian-activist Jon Stewart, host of “The Daily Show” on Comedy Central and main news source for many young liberal hipsters.

Stewart is celebrated once again by the Times, this time on the front of the Monday Business section by media reporters David Carr and Brian Stelter, for his latest crusade, a push to fund the health care of 9-11 responders who became ill. The online headline “In ‘Daily Show’ Role on 9/11 Bill, Echoes of Murrow.” A comparison to Murrow, the vaunted journalist slayer of Sen. Joe McCarthy, is a deep compliment in liberal media circles.

Did the bill pledging federal funds for the health care of 9/11 responders become law in the waning hours of the 111th Congress only because a comedian took it up as a personal cause?

And does that make that comedian, Jon Stewart -- despite all his protestations that what he does has nothing to do with journalism -- the modern-day equivalent of Edward R. Murrow?