Stelter in a Time of Storm

Reliable Sources, CNN’s media watchdog program, is hard to watch. It should be retitled Pot Calls Kettle to match host Brian Stelter’s teapot head, so often skirling from a full steam. To avoid all that, I read the transcript of his Sunday episode to take in his much-​quoted tear defending Big Tech’s deplatforming of alternative media and attacking the three news channels he hates so much — OAN, Newsmax, and, especially and always, Fox.

You see, they’re liars!

He’s not, of course; CNN’s not, he says — without ever managing to acknowledge his job at CNN, deliverer of the Official Spin. 

And ignorer of the laundry list of whoppers espoused by his own network.

Which Glenn Greenwald made clear in his response: “CNN lies and spreads conspiracy theories constantly. They’re a pro-​Democratic Party outlet that barely airs any dissent from the DNC line. If @brianstelter’s standards for banishing Fox were applied equally, it’d affect all cable news outlets, not just one.”

Asserting that “disinformation” about the pandemic is “harmful” — while CNN’s slavish towing of the government’s incoherent, shifting line on COVID has not been??? — Stelter offers a “harm reduction” model. Deplatforming people he disagrees with? Why, that’s not an abridgment of “freedom of speech.”

All he itches for is to cripple his competitors’ “freedom of reach.”

But take a breath: extending the reach of one’s speech is why we have “the press.” This freedom of the press (“reach”) is also protected from government, to be valued even when we disagree with our opponents.

The idea that a few CNN hosts get to determine The Official Truth for everybody else, and that this should be institutionalized in some broad, society-​wide way, would toll the death knell of America.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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