CNN’s Brian Stelter made an appearance on C-SPAN on Tuesday, where a couple of callers decided to give him their thoughts on his network. No one deserves to be the recipient of that criticism more than him.
Stelter is often referred to as the media’s janitor, but really, he holds a far more prestigious position. Stelter is, in effect, the media’s mascot. He’s the cartoonish representation of what the media have become, and he plays the part of media concern troll well.
That’s why Stelter dismissed a C-SPAN caller’s criticism as the byproduct of “radicalization.” He says that media criticism is out of bounds when the word “enemy” is used because the semantics are more important than the actual criticism is. It’s easier to sound the alarm over a word than it is to address why it is the media ran to smear a high school student over a misleading viral video, which led to CNN settling out of court.
It also doesn’t explain why CNN should be confronting elderly women on their own front lawns and blasting out her identity across the internet. Or threatening to dox private citizens over wrestling gifs posted on Reddit, then blackmailing them into an apology and bragging about it. CNN certainly seems to be an enemy to those people.
This is the game CNN plays, where President Trump is a grave threat to democracy, but the network was more than happy to plaster him all over its airwaves during the 2016 GOP primary. Jake Tapper can be the straight-shooting reporter who can also head down to Parkland and whip a crowd into comparing Marco Rubio to a school shooter. Chris Cuomo can pretend to be a serious journalist while hoisting commercial props over his brother’s nursing home graves and playing Lazarus for the cameras.
No one better exemplifies the CNN game than Stelter, who is a media apologist playing media critic. Aside from nipping at the heels of Sean Hannity and Fox News, Stelter runs interference for some of the media’s bigger failures, including his own. If you ask him, the real victim of the state of American politics is always the media.
From his failure ever to see the forest for the trees to his indignation whenever he’s the subject of criticism, Stelter encapsulates the massive institutional failures that led to a free fall in media trust. This makes Stelter the perfect media mascot.
