When now-former CNN host Brian Stelter’s show was canceled, I wrote here that I hoped he would finally shed his clearly uncomfortable skin of a straight-news ombudsmen, since in practice he was nothing more than janitor for the far left. Brian’s job was to clean up the media’s messes and attack his conservative competition. He may have thought he was doing a great service, yet viewing audiences and ultimately his new boss saw otherwise.
As it turns out, Stelter seems to be taking my advice — while also forgoing any semblance of self-introspection.
Stelter recently accepted a media fellowship role at Harvard where he’ll be hosting a series of “discourses” on the media’s role as it pertains to “threats to democracy,” the latest drumbeat coming directly out of the Biden White House. As Stelter himself tweeted, “This fall I’ll be the Walter Shorenstein Media and Democracy Fellow, convening discussions, some of which will be live-streamed.” Harvard grads will be shelling out thousands in tuition and having their student loans paid off by the taxpayers in order to listen to someone who barely anyone tuned in to listen to for the cost of a monthly cable bill.
As for Stelter, he’ll be entering a favorite realm of the Twitter media personality, the classroom, where terms like “both-sidesism” are regularly thrown around (most notably by NYU journalism professor and Twitter blue check Jay Rosen, who believes his job is to teach his journalism students to cover one political party with complete hostility). It’s within this feedback loop that Stelter will be completely at home — unchallenged by his peers while he hocks his anti-Fox book and crafts his lectures around Media Matters headlines.
Stelter will no doubt parlay this experience into another job, because everyone in media paid up with the right people inevitably fail upwards. Certainly those in the favor of former CNN head Jeff Zucker have a bright future ahead of them, even if it leads to a more dysfunctional media environment for the rest of us. The media-to-classroom pipeline will simply strengthen the ideological bubble that led to Stelter’s dismissal from CNN in the first place.
Yet what Stelter’s lectures won’t offer is introspection as to how we got to this so-called precipice of democracy. What was the media’s role in leading us here (for instance, the $5 billion in free media given to Donald Trump in 2016 by journalists like Stelter and his former boss)? What plan do they have to correct their course (as opposed to simply slandering 50 percent of the voting public)?
At least Stelter will finally be able to acknowledge what anyone who’s watched him has realized instantly: that he was never an honest and objective media reporter.
