Report: Brian Stelter to Exit CNN in ‘Weeks if Not Days’

Stelter
Matt Winkelmeyer/Getty Images for Vanity Fair
Wendell Husebø

CNN’s Reliable Sources host Brian Stelter will reportedly be fired at CNN within “weeks if not days” amid the network’s management shakeup.

CNN’s new chief Chris Licht “is ready to boot on-air personalities who have destroyed the brand by becoming irredeemable partisan hacks,” which means Brian Stelter is reportedly on the hot seat after the fresh rebranding tactics have been put forward, Breitbart News reported.

CNN’s new management suggested the network’s employees need to distance themselves from Democrat talking points and slogans in “hopes to rein in partisanship” to increase ratings and revenue, Vanity Fair reported Thursday. The ratings of Stelter’s show have been poor for some time.

The changing environment at CNN will impact Stelter, according to President of News Cycle Media Jon Nicosia on Wednesday. “Stelter is ‘down to weeks if not days’ left at CNN,” Nicosia reported based on a source. “They go on ‘He is everything that reminds the new owners of the Zucker era they desperately want to get past.”

The changes to the network come after the former president of CNN, Jeff Zucker, left the network in February upon being questioned about his relationship with longtime CNN executive Allison Gollust as part of the broader Cuomo investigation, which showed that Chris Cuomo had aided his brother, then-New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, through a sexual harassment scandal.

A former CNN employee confirmed to Breitbart News in March that Stelter was “freaking out” about Zucker’s ouster because he “will be swept up in the internal investigation given his closeness to Jeff Zucker.”

Stelter is known to push false narratives. Stelter claimed Hunter Biden’s “laptop” was “Russian disinformation.” Hunter’s laptop was verified as authentic by Breitbart News’s Emma-Jo Morris in the fall of 2020. Over a year later, the establishment media finally confirmed its authenticity.

“For all we know, these emails are made up or maybe some are real and others are fakes — we don’t know,” Stelter claimed. “But we do know this is a classic example of the right-wing media machine. A tip from Bannon and a hard drive dump from Rudy led a former producer for Sean Hannity’s show to write a story for the New York Post that gets splashed on the front page, that Rudy then used to trash the Bidens all over Fox, doing it almost every hour of the day, and Trump has been hyping the drama for days on end, and this is how it goes on and on.”

Stelter refused to retract his false statements and insinuations when pressed by Breitbart News regarding these claims he made on his program. Instead, Stelter accused Breitbart News of false reporting.

“So… you clearly can’t back up your assertion that I claimed ‘Hunter Biden’s laptop emails were likely Russian propaganda’ — thanks for confirming that what you wrote is false,” he responded to this author.

Breitbart News requested comment from Stelter about his future at CNN to which there was no response.

Follow Wendell Husebø on Twitter and Gettr @WendellHusebø. He is the author of Politics of Slave Morality.

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