"There has been like wave after wave after wave of people leaving the Democratic Party.... They're gonna keep shedding people. They're not gonna correct course. This is a buffalo drop."

"One of the ways to hunt buffalo was to get them to the edge of a cliff and just run at them and they'd just fall off the edge of the cliff. And then people would be waiting on the bottom and they'd butcher 'em and eat 'em.... They're not course correcting at all.... Their understanding of social media and the dynamics that you set up by having completely state-controlled mainstream media where they only said the narratives that you guys wanted —  they all said it in step. So you could watch different programs repeat the exact same words, exact same phrases. We know they got talking points. We don't trust you anymore. We don't trust the New York Times. We don't trust the Washington Post. We don't trust CNN or any of the MSNBC... They're all full with propaganda.  And so that's why the internet rose. It's not because there was some sort of a fucking right wing conspiracy.... No, you guys suck. You guys fucking suck. And you're not real people and you're not like, nobody wants to hang out with Brian Stelter. You know what I'm saying? There's the, none of these fucking people are people that people can actually relate to and like...."

💯
pic.twitter.com/u6x37VJlGA

— Harry Bōlz (@elonmusk) February 11, 2025

"At Zucker’s Trump-baiting CNN, Stelter thrived.... But Zucker was forced to resign from the network, and a new regime under Chris Licht stepped in..."

"... with a goal of rejiggering CNN’s programming, scrubbing it of liberal political valence....Under new ownership, CNN’s parent company was in thrall to the libertarian billionaire John Malone, who said that he wanted to see 'CNN evolve back to the kind of journalism that it started with, and actually have journalists, which would be unique and refreshing.'"

Writes Clare Malone in "A TV Face of the Trump Resistance Exits/Brian Stelter, the host of the CNN show 'Reliable Sources,' which was cancelled this week, went from media chronicler to media-chronicled" (The New Yorker).

I had trouble understanding that headline because I have been using the tag "the Trump resistance" to refer Trump and his supporters as they've resisted accepting Biden's victory in the 2020 election. That includes the January 6th riot/insurrection and the investigation into it. So it took me a couple seconds to see "the Trump resistance" as meaning the resistance to Trump and not the resistance by and on behalf of Trump. That reveals how little I have bothered with the CNN eminence that was Brian Stelter. The truth is, I don't watch any TV news channels.

Back to the article. This next sentence had me almost changing course and inviting readers to participate in a sentence-diagramming contest (or just to rewrite this in as few words as possible):

"My subscriptions went up massively. That's what's crazy," said Joe Rogan. "During the height of it all, I gained 2 million subscribers...."

"They went for it.... It's fortunate that the people that went for it were CNN, and they're just so untrustworthy. People know how biased they are, and they know how socially weird their fucking anchors are — just these awkward, non-relatable people.... If there's someone on TV... — like Jon Stewart is a great, relatable person who I find to be a brilliant guy, a kind person — if Jon Stewart thinks you're a piece of shit, I'm going to listen. But if Brian Stelter doesn't like you — it doesn't mean anything to me.... [Stelter's] pattern of communication is so strange. It's like: Do you listen to other people? They talk very differently than you...."

From Joe Rogan's episode #1807 (with Douglas Murray), which went up on Spotify yesterday. 

"During the height of it all" refers to a boycott started by Neil Young and aimed at getting Rogan kicked off Spotify.

"On the flip side, CNN engages in this partisan coverage filtering as well."

 

ADDED: Here's the WaPo opinion piece on that segment: "CNN’s Brian Stelter blindsided by co-author of Fox News study" by Erik Wemple. CNN's Brian Stelter was "blindsided" because the researchers who were expected to criticize Fox News proceeded to say CNN does it too.

Everyone in the office knew? Fire everyone!

That was my out-loud outburst when I read: "'The network needs to step up and fire Brian Stelter,' the CNN insider told DailyMail.com. 'He is allegedly our top media reporter - yet he failed to report on the scoop that everyone in the office knew. And if he wants to say he didn't know, he is truly terrible at his job.'"

That's in "CNN insider says network 'needs to step up and fire Brian Stelter' for not exposing Jeff Zucker affair: report/The network employee said Stelter's 'been sitting on his moral high horse doing Jeff's biddling'" (Fox News).

One suspects that no one reported it because no one perceived it as wrong... wrong enough.  But it was against the rules. Zucker, resigning, said: "I was required to disclose it when it began but I didn’t. I was wrong."

The top comment over at Fox is: "Zucker's relationship was no secret and was not the reason he was fired. It was an excuse to fire him after programming an 80% decline in viewership in one year. There is accountability when you work for a public company."

An interesting take on accountability, firing a person for a fake reason. If the reason given is fake, not only is CNN allowing him to evade public responsibility for his degradation of the substance of what was actually televised on CNN, but it is raising expectations that CNN is serious about the sex rule Zucker flouted. And now they're going to have to keep enforcing it, including retrospectively.

Stelter's plaint would mean more if he'd face up to how badly CNN's Sanjay Gupta fared when he sat down with Joe Rogan.

CNN’s @brianstelter: People trusting Joe Rogan over “newsrooms like CNN” are “a problem that’s much bigger than Spotify” pic.twitter.com/3RnifScIzk

— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) February 1, 2022

 

Background: "CNN praises Dr. Sanjay Gupta for interview with Joe Rogan, buries viral moments/Gupta admitted his CNN colleagues should not have referred to Rogan's COVID treatment as 'horse dewormer'" (NY Post, October 15, 2021). That's something I blogged at the time, here: "In trying to present Sanjay Gupta as a science-is-real hero for talking to Joe Rogan for 3 hours, CNN laid the groundwork for fact-checkers to draw attention to all the most damaging omissions." 

ADDED: Writing this post and searching my own archive for Sanjay Gupta, I turned up a post from January 7, 2009, when President-Elect Obama was considering Gupta for the position of Surgeon General. There was debate at the time about the way Gupta had treated the filmmaker Michael Moore about his movie "Sicko."

World gone mad?

When @BariWeiss describes the kind of madness that we have all witnessed, @BrianStelter pretends as if he doesn’t know what she’s talking about. Such gaslighting is of course a big part of the problem. | pic.twitter.com/q5JZlTl7K1

— Mike (@Doranimated) October 18, 2021