Brian Stelter Explores Media Cluelessness

Tim Graham on Nov 15, 2024

After the decisive Republican victory on Election Day, one question bouncing around in conservative circles was: Will this lead the liberal media to change their ways? Will they reflect on how they are not in any way the "mainstream" media?

It's unlikely. They believe all their own bravado about being on the front lines against incoming "fascism." But at least Brian Stelter went asking around for his "Reliable Sources" newsletter. He kept his media insiders anonymous so they could spill their beans.

Stelter said one anchor texted him that while the media speculated about "Trump amnesia," as in forgetting "the chaos and COVID missteps of his first term." They said, "Voters DID remember. They just remembered different parts of the Trump presidency."

That's a crucial distinction. Many Trump voters think the Democrats and the bureaucrats made a lot of "COVID missteps," but the media have been remarkably uninterested in reevaluating that. The "chaos" was real, but it was perennially exaggerated by the press trying to tear the administration apart and get appointees to quit or get sacked.

This anonymous source added that "unconscious bias has an impact, when your values and status in life is so different than the majority of Americans." They are significantly richer than the average American and thus think "the end of democracy" is the biggest issue, so who cares about inflation?

Stelter was forced to face that live on CNN in October when Shermichael Singleton told him that lots of voters are mad about spending billions in aid to Ukraine when we have domestic demands like disaster relief. Stelter shot back that he doesn't "live in that country" with those complaints and "America's not that horrible." Singleton told him to "get out of New York and talk to regular people."

Then it grew annoying when one radio journalist mourned to Stelter that it's "hard not to see this election as just a national repudiation of what we do. We spent four years reporting so aggressively" on subjects like election denialism and Jan. 6. And "many voters evidently didn't care," Stelter summarized.

This election is obviously a repudiation of "what they did." Voters surely disapproved of rioting at the Capitol. But it was one afternoon, and the Democrats and the press wildly exaggerated it for this entire presidency as something as deadly as 9/11. Voters could sense that reporters were working "aggressively" in the same vein as Biden's prosecutors and the Pelosi-picked panel on Jan. 6. The objective wasn't just "accountability"; it was the Democratic Party at work. It was a crusade to drive Trump out of politics altogether and create a blue wave.

Many voters saw through all of this, noticing that the talking points of Democratic social media accounts and the "news judgment" of the liberal media match very neatly. They felt they were not watching "news." It's more like a perpetual advertisement, the endless drumming of a partisan narrative.

One of Stelter's anonymous journalists asked why "stick around" when "the demonization of the media will continue." But they routinely fail to realize that the demonization of their opponents is their daily bread and brie cheese.

What journalists intended to be Trump's "vulnerabilities" -- the impeachments, the lawsuits, the sexual assault claims, the felony convictions, the Jack Smith probes -- were all seen as the Democratic machine at work, even as the media pretended these prosecutors and judges and juries weren't Democrats.

In the end, CNN and The New York Times and the rest are going to keep trying to please their audience with anti-Trump hot takes. They can't afford to disappoint their "base."

Tim Graham is director of media analysis at the Media Research Center and executive editor of the blog NewsBusters.org. To find out more about Tim Graham and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.