This may be a surprise, but CNN’s Brian Stelter doesn’t exactly have his finger on the pulse of the country.
“The theme — the talking point on the Right is about protecting kids from the dangers of … the Walt Disney Company,” Stelter said, referring to what he thinks the Republican strategy is for the midterm elections. “Really. But Disney is just a stand-in. It’s just a symbol for something bigger: a conservative backlash to growing acceptance of gay and transgender people.”
In that brief quote, Stelter manages to show that he either thinks he’s much smarter than he really is or that the few people in his audience are incredibly gullible. He manages to get everything wrong, willfully or not, in his effort to pillory conservative media.
“We’re seeing a theme of the midterm elections emerging,” @brianstelter says. “The theme, the talking point on the right, is about protecting kids from the dangers of… The Walt Disney Company.” pic.twitter.com/xmoM4n81Cl
— Reliable Sources (@ReliableSources) April 6, 2022
First of all, the Right did not pick any fight with Disney. Democrats pressured Disney to pick the fight against Florida’s bill that prevents teachers from in-class instruction on sexual orientation and gender transitions to children in third grade and below. Florida Democrats and gay and transgender activists pressured Disney to weigh in on legislation that no one at the company even bothered to read. Conservatives merely responded to Disney’s naked partisanship. They did not skillfully orchestrate this fight for an electoral advantage, although it may yet confer one. After all, polls show that even Florida Democrats support this law. This is not a controversial issue — except in the niche digital sphere that Stelter and his CNN colleagues inhabit.
Stelter is also wrong about the purpose of the law. It has nothing to do with “acceptance of gay and transgender people” or “traditional values.” The law was passed to prevent teachers from gender-transitioning young students at school without the knowledge of parents, which had indeed already happened more than once in Florida at that point — hence the new law. In Stelter’s formulation, “acceptance of gay and transgender people” includes teaching first graders about sexual orientation and hiding students’ gender dysphoria from their parents. If that’s what he wants to argue, he should really say it out loud and honestly without euphemisms.
Most importantly, Stelter is entirely wrong on what the theme of the midterm elections will be. The driving force in the elections is President Joe Biden’s incompetence. Voters are being driven by a completely separate set of issues — especially inflation and the price of gas. Polls suggest that they strongly disapprove of how Democrats and Biden, given unified control of the federal government, have handled the major problems the country is currently facing.
But CNN’s media critic, whose only job is to attack conservative media, doesn’t understand, or pretends not to understand, the nature of this fight or why the Democratic Party is so unpopular right now. Maybe the midterm elections will bring him and CNN back to reality.
