CNN Reliable Sources host Brian Stelter is so robotically repetitive in his anti-Trump speeches that he actually boasted on Sunday that he was repeating word-for-word a 2017 lecture on Trump’s anti-media rhetoric being “poison.” He began by declaring “The American press is stronger than any demagogue, but President Trump’s attacks present real challenges.”
Stelter showed a video by Long Island reporter Kevin Vesey of Trump fans yelling at him that he’s “fake news” and an “enemy of the people.” I have no idea if Vesey sounds anything like CNN in his daily stories, but Stelter mustered the usual disgust and exasperation that anyone would say a discouraging word to a reporter.
“The president is encouraging confrontations with reporters. He's saying it's okay. He's saying it's patriotic, it's Trumpian to confront local TV reporters to yell epithets while they're trying to work, to act menacing in front of kids,” he lectured. “It’s where we are. This is the kind of stuff you see in you autocracies, not democracies.”
Stelter calls Trump a demagogue and an autocrat, and then he lectures that we need…..basic decency?
BRIAN STELTER: Here’s what makes this cycle so vicious, what makes this back and forth so vicious. The president lies, reporters point it out. He says the media hates him. Then his supporters back him up. They excuse the lie. They defend their guy. They get even more alienated from the media. They become convinced reporters are the enemy, and this helps Trump, so he keeps raising the volume, and then there’s even more to criticize, and online the shouting’s even louder and louder on social media, and harassment and threats against reporters become constant, and the attacks against Trump, and on and on it goes. It is a vicious, vicious cycle. But basic decency is not and should never be partisan. It is not a Republican or Democratic idea.
These endless and toxic CNN lectures -- which completely fail to acknowledge the nasty warp and woof of their own "news" -- are preposterous. How are CNN and the other national media outlets not participating in this “vicious cycle”? They’re just observing “lies,” and “pointing it out.” Reporters are apparently never to be insulted, or called on their vicious insults of the president.
This is Brian Stelter talking, the host who put on an “expert” to proclaim Donald Trump was going to kill more people than Stalin, Hitler, and Mao combined. Was that “basic decency,” or viciousness?
Stelter’s self-denial is so strong he told Ezra Klein that only Fox – and not CNN or MSNBC – had a model of making their viewers “pissed” to keep them watching.
In the same show he was oozing over “decency,” Stelter promoted former Australian prime minister Kevin Rudd calling Fox News part of a “Murdoch mafia,” and put on screen that the “Murdoch empire” was a “cancer on democracy.”
Stelter’s show’s idea of a Republican was to put on Never-Trumper Peter Wehner, who couldn’t even fully acknowledge that conservatives had a point that the media are hostile to them.
PS: In his hour, Stelter never mentioned liberal attacks on CBS reporter Catherine Herridge, because there is no "vicious, vicious cycle" when Fox reporters or ex-Fox reporters get attacked.
