CNN media reporter Brian Stelter lost his temper during a BBC Radio 4 roundtable at the suggestion that mainstream media newsrooms had shown poor ethics and a double standard in their breathless reporting of the “Russia collusion” hoax.
The panel discussion discussed the controversy over censorship of the recent story about Hunter Biden’s emails, which many newsrooms ignored and the Silicon Valley social media companies actively suppressed. Stelter supported the suppression, saying that the tech companies needed to do more of it.
He was confronted by Susan Ferrechio of the Washington Examiner (via The Federalist):
.@susanferrechio destroys Stelter in this interview. When she challenged the media on ethics, Stelter fumed, “Don’t you dare” twice.
“You can don’t dare me all you want, Brian. I’ve been doing this for 30 years, so say whatever you want. It’s my view.”pic.twitter.com/vQOpi2nbJY
— Cameron Cawthorne (@Cam_Cawthorne) October 21, 2020
“I think the bottom line is we don’t know what is real and what is fake in these emails if there is anything real in them,” Stelter said.
“Yeah, but that didn’t stop anyone from reporting the Mueller and the dossier,” Ferrechio replied.
While Stelter suggested degradingly, “I understand that you have a lot of resentment about that” and “I agree with you should not be ignored,” Ferrechio was quick to call him out on his hypocrisy.
“Now we have ethics,” she said sarcastically.
“Don’t you dare,” Stelter replied, getting defensive. “Don’t you dare act like newsrooms didn’t have ethics in 2017 and 2018.”
“You can ‘don’t dare’ me all you want, Brian,” Ferrechio said. “I’ve been doing this for 30 years, so say whatever you want. It’s my view, and I have a right to say it.”
Earlier, Stelter had called the Hunter Biden story “last season’s episode.” Ferrechio retorted: “This is not last year’s news. It’s whether or not [Joe Biden’s] son was coordinating to get him to talk to these Ukrainian oligarchs, and he was benefiting from it. This is really dirty.”
Fellow panelist Sara Fischer of Axios praised the “defense systems” at tech companies, in partnership with the “intelligence community,” that prevented the Hunter Biden story from spreading.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). His newest e-book is The Trumpian Virtues: The Lessons and Legacy of Donald Trump’s Presidency. His recent book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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