The Media Lies

The ousted CNN host was a hitman on behalf of the media

One of cable news infotainment’s most shameless hosts is out of a job. On Thursday CNN canceled the Sunday morning show Reliable Sources and released its host Brian Stelter.

The media’s janitor, as I’ve come to call him, is unemployed for now, but don’t expect it to last. The New York Times has had a media columnist opening since Ben Smith left in January — and that’s where Stelter made his name.

It’s no secret that the mainstream media has abandoned objective reporting for a long time. The left-leaning — and often more than leaning — narratives from the press aren’t hard to miss.

But there’s more at play than just reporting the news from one particular viewpoint. The mainstream media, along with social media and cultural tastemakers, attempt to lead the public to question anything that doesn’t hew to a far-left narrative. The end result, in the hopeful minds of the media, is that everyone who consumes their media will move to the left politically and culturally.

A Reuters Institute survey found that a rising number of people are avoiding the news or just don’t believe it

This might be just another negative news story. And if it is, there is evidence that many of you will turn away in despair.

The Reuters Institute revealed last month that 42% of Americans actively avoid the news at least some of the time because it grinds them down or they just don’t believe it. Fifteen percent said they disconnected from news coverage altogether. In other countries, such as the UK and Brazil, the numbers selectively avoiding it were even higher.

“In the United States, those who self-identify on the right are far more likely to avoid news because they think it is untrustworthy or biased, but those on the left are more likely to feel overwhelmed, carry feelings of powerlessness, or worry that the news might create arguments,” the institute said.

Interest in the news, among young people in particular, has reached a new low, according to a global survey.

While engagement dipped for all age groups, the highly valued younger demographic was more prone to avoiding the news, most commonly due to fatigue and the negative effect on how they feel, the 2022 Reuters Institute Digital News Report found.

Since Russia invaded Ukraine, pro-interventionist accounts have dominated the airwaves and op-ed pages.

Far too often, the elite U.S. press has been a reliable mouthpiece for Washington’s dubious foreign policies. That was true during the Cold War, except for a brief period of disillusionment and dissent once the Vietnam War became such an obvious debacle. That period of more vigorous scrutiny and skepticism did not last long, however. When George H. W. Bush launched his drive for U.S. military intervention in the Persian Gulf to expel Iraqi forces from Kuwait, CNN, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and other elite outlets were fully on board with that agenda, as their shamelessly biased treatment of the relevant issues confirmed. That pro-interventionist bias became even more flagrant during the Balkan crises of the 1990s, the lead-up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, and Washington’s subsequent campaigns for forcible regime change in Libya and Syria. There was very little daylight between the official U.S. government positions on those issues and the dominant media narratives.