Journalists convince themselves that their product is “news,” but often it’s just publicity, especially when liberal journalists hail other liberal journalists for their hard-working idealism. Take Tuesday’s gushy Washington Post profile of CNN media reporter and Reliable Sources host Brian Stelter. The online headline was “Brian Stelter has been training for this moment his entire life.” What moment?
Post reporter/publicist Ellen McCarthy never quite manages an answer to that question: the “moment” is the Trump inauguration, and his current crusade to crush the career of Fox News star Bill O’Reilly. Here’s how she sets the table for treacle:
NEW YORK -- On March 3, the day Brian Stelter was scheduled to take part in a Columbia Journalism School panel discussion on Trump and the media, he sent his first tweet at 6:04 a.m.
By the time he sat down for the 10:30 a.m. talk, the CNN senior media correspondent had published 20 tweets. He tweeted while waiting for the conversation to begin. He tweeted when it was over. He tweeted as it was happening….
At Columbia, Stelter told the audience that his whole career was preparation for this moment.
“I feel like everything up until Election Day was rehearsal,” he said. “I was just practicing. It was just warm-up for this act.”
But that was an understatement. His whole life has been a warm-up for this act.
McCarthy’s article offered all the detachment and objectivity of Brian Stelter’s mother. What followed was a series of gushy moments of Stelter’s industrious childhood and young adulthood -- calling the local CBS station in D.C. with snow totals, calling video-game makers in Tokyo and running up large phone bills, starting a fan page for children’s author R.L. Stein.
When he was still in high school, his father died of a heart attack. So we read of how young Stelter's ambition and industry only grew:
Even then his appetite and ambition were outpaced only by his productivity. “He was just on fire,” says his school newspaper adviser, Cynthia Reilly. The summer before his senior year, she recalls, he independently wrote an exhaustive guidebook laying out the paper’s standards and style rules. “I said, ‘It’s fabulous, but you realize this is overwhelming for the other kids.’ ” They edited it down to a few key points.
Then, in college, Stelter started the blog TV Newser, a “must-read site for television professionals.” He channeled that success into getting hired at The New York Times right out of college, and getting hired at CNN at age 28.
CNN must have loved the headlines in the paper. Under a huge half-page photo of Stelter was the healed “Brian Stelter is a reporting machine: Why there’s no off button on CNN’s tireless media reporter.” Inside the headline was “CNN’s Brian Stelter: ‘He’s kind of a force of nature.’”
That quote came from inside CNN:
“He’s kind of a force of nature,” says Rich Barbieri, Stelter’s editor at CNNMoney.com. “There are reporters out there who just cannot turn their curiosity off. That’s Brian.”
McCarthy reports the February viewership of Reliable Sources was up 50 percent from the same month in 2016, and goes back to CNN for analysis:
…Barbieri thinks that’s because Stelter brings “so much knowledge and context and sophistication to the beat.” Stelter phrases it differently. Yes, he’s a journalist covering journalism. But at heart, he’s a fanboy, geeking out on his greatest obsession – and wanting to protect it from shoddy work or unwarranted attacks. “I think people can tell I love this stuff, he says.”
The Post never arrives at a definition of what "shoddy work or unwarranted attacks" are. But we can guess that it might be anyone accusing the liberal media of a liberal bias. No one outside of Stelter's inner circle is quoted in this cotton-candy puff piece.
There's no one to question the quality (and not just the quantity) of Stelter's work, no one to question whether accusing President Trump of "authoritarian tendencies" is a tad overwrought, no one to question whether Stelter's sheer aggression at trying to get the top-rated Fox News host fired might reek of a business objective more than an attack on "shoddy work" or sexual harassment. It would be nice to even suggest that CNN's media unit really stinks at covering CNN's scandals....like Donna Brazile feeding town-hall questions to the Hillary campaign.
Most obviously, no one at the Post wants to let someone declare on their turf that this is just liberals praising liberals for being liberal. Or that this is the Post buttering up a media reporter so all his CNN reporting on the Washington Post stays hunky-dory, and he keeps booking Post media columnist Margaret Sullivan on his Sunday show to echo his liberal talking points.
