CNN’s Big Secret BREAKING: Host reveals that journalists don’t like Trump. James Freedman
https://www.wsj.com/articles/cnns-big-secret-1503434389
Now it can be told. A CNN host named Brian Stelter confided to his audience this week about conversations occurring off-camera and off the record across the media landscape. According to Mr. Stelter:
President Trump’s actions and inactions in the wake of Charlottesville are provoking some uncomfortable conversations, mostly off the air if we’re being honest. In discussions among friends and family, and debates on social media, people are questioning the president’s fitness. But these conversations are happening in news rooms and TV studios as well.
Usually after the microphones are off, or after the stories are filed, after the paper has been put to bed, people’s concerns, and fears and questions come out. Questions that feel out of bounds, off limits, too hot for TV. Questions like these: Is the president of the United States a racist? Is he suffering from some kind of illness? Is he fit for office? And if he’s unfit, then what?
These are upsetting, polarizing questions. They’re uncomfortable to ask.
It’s not clear why Mr. Stelter wanted to raise the question of whether he and his colleagues are being honest. But there is certainly a question of just how uncomfortable CNN has been about raising issues related to President Trump’s health and character. “My impression is that since President Trump’s inauguration, there’s been a lot of tiptoeing going on,” added Mr. Stelter.
Perhaps he was referring to the program he hosted a month into the Trump presidency. Mr. Stelter called Mr. Trump’s words “a verbal form of poison” and said the President instills “fear in many people.” Then, appearing above a CNN headline saying, “TRUMP’S NIXON-ESQUE PRESS BASHING,” Mr. Stelter invited Carl Bernstein to tiptoe into the story. The former Washington Post reporter pronounced that Mr. Trump’s attacks on the press “are more treacherous than Richard Nixon’s ” and proceeded to reference Stalin and Hitler.
Mr. Bernstein has had plenty more to say on Mr. Stelter’s program, even before the inauguration. Here’s a transcript from a CNN appearance by Mr. Bernstein in March of last year:
STELTER: Carl, I want to come to you. You’re in Los Angeles this morning. You’ve been talking about this, talking about Trump for months as a neo-fascist. I want you to tell me why and how you view this current moment.
BERNSTEIN: Well, it’s a difficult term and the word “neo” meaning “new”, has a lot to do with it, a new kind of fascist in our culture, dealing with an authoritarian, demagogic point of view, nativist, anti-immigrant, racism, bigotry that he appeals to, and I think we need to look at the past. And I’m not talking about Hitlerism and genocide, and I’m not making a direct parallel to Mussolini — but a kind of American fascism that we haven’t seen before, different than George Wallace who was merely a racist. This goes to authoritarianism. It goes to despotism. The desire for a strong man who doesn’t trust the institutions of democracy and government. And my point is that we now need on cable news to have a debate, a historical debate about what fascism was and is and how Donald Trump fits into that picture, because it is something very foreign to our political culture in terms of a major presidential candidate in the 20th, or 21st century. And that debate is going on in print, online, but it is not part of our debate on cable.
Perhaps Messrs. Bernstein and Stelter were unaware that their microphones were on and that they were appearing on cable. But the watchdogs at the Media Research Center point out another occasion last year when Mr. Bernstein described Mr. Trump on CNN as a “neo-fascist sociopath.”
In this week’s report on how journalists have allegedly been reluctant to raise uncomfortable questions about the President, Mr. Stelter invited comment from panelists including Mr. Bernstein and Douglas Brinkley. Regular CNN viewers may recall that Mr. Brinkley has previously appeared on the network to declare Mr. Trump “unfit for command” and to opine that the President has “low moral standards.” This time the historian decided to offer a free medical diagnosis of the President, according to the transcript:
BRINKLEY: I mean, on the medical front, look, we all know he is a neon billboard for, you know, overt narcissism, malignant self-love. We’ve all known that. And now, we’re seeing that we’re getting the ramifications as a nation of what having a sick man in the White House means. I think the Senate might need to move —
STELTER: A sick man in the White House.
BRINKLEY: We — he is. He’s not mentally stable. And we need a — perhaps the Senate needs to do a censure coming up here.
Alice Stewart was also a panelist this week and tried to politely steer the various non-doctors on the program toward making political, rather than medical, judgments. Based on a similar segment from May of this year, it appears that CNN likes to call Ms. Stewart for more balanced commentary when the network wants to raise “uncomfortable” questions about Mr. Trump’s mental health that may be “too hot for TV”—but appear on CNN anyway.
In any case, the crescendo of this week’s show came with the following exchange:
BRINKLEY: I think we’re at that state now when the five generals of the Joint Chiefs of Staff have to go out and enter politics and say, we want nothing to do with what the president is saying. It is a crisis going on in the White House and it’s about Donald Trump’s fitness for command.
STELTER: Alice, all this talk about military leaders, some foreign correspondents writing about the United States from other countries would bring up the word coup, a soft coup, with all this talk of military leaders intervening.
A soft coup? “It was apocalypse now on Brian Stelter’s CNN show,” observes Mark Finkelstein at Legal Insurrection.
This column can hardly imagine what these guys talk about when they really are off-camera.
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