They Really Do Hate Us

Before I get into today’s piece, I want to talk about Brian Stelter and Reliable Sources.

Brian loves the media. When he was a student, he created a website called TVNewser that chronicled TV newscasts, focusing on cable news. It is where I’d go to find out all the gossip about the ups and downs of cable news. He might have loved it a bit too much.

Brian got his job at CNN as I was leaving CNN. Howard Kurtz had moved to Fox. Over time, I believe that Brian’s love of cable news got the better of him. He could focus on the aspects he hated, which leaned towards hating the right and Fox and Trump, at the expense of the parts he loved. Reliable Sources became an amen corner of pundits patting each other on the back for what came across as their hatred of the right, Fox, and Trump, with little accountability for the news industry in general.

Reliable Sources failed to cover the judge in the Kyle Rittenhouse matter banning MSNBC; USA Today allowing Stacey Abrams a retroactive edit of an already published op-ed on Georgia’s election law; the Rolling Stone story about ivermectin overdoses in Oklahoma that turned out not to be true well after it was picked up by other media outlets; and a number of other major stories. But the show focused relentlessly on Trump and Fox and the right.

It’s hard to hold the people you like accountable, and Reliable Sources turned into a show with a liberal focus on the news that treated cable news as some necessary and near holy part of society that had to be defended instead of a business that had to be critiqued. Frankly, I think the proof is in the reaction to the show’s cancellation. I am unaware of any conservative who is lamenting its demise. That is not a standard of measure. But I find it notable for how the show came to be perceived.

All that said, I won’t be one of those dancing on the grave of Reliable Sources. There are some, but generally few, people whose loss of a job I celebrate. I think CNN has a role to play in holding the media and itself accountable. I continue to be intrigued with the direction the new president is taking the company. And as for Brian, I wish him nothing but the best. He fell victim to loving cable news as much as he did and could not pivot from the direction Reliable Sources had taken because of it. I didn’t care for how the show became a reliable panel of liberals convinced of their most important work. But I like Brian personally and was tremendously impressed that he went from starting, essentially, a fanboy site covering cable news to leading the preeminent news show covering cable news as a product.

Now, on to the larger point.

I hope you’ll listen to my monologue below.

Edward Luce, the former Washington bureau chief of the Financial Times, who is now an Associate Editor and columnist there, contends that Republicans are the most awful political force on the planet. Michael Hayden, the former head of the CIA agrees. Hayden argued Twitter should censor the New York Post because the Hunter Biden laptop story was Russian disinformation.

Concurrently, Sam Harris, a popular liberal atheist philosopher, contends the ends justify the means to stop Trump. Harris argued that a conspiracy to stop Trump to protect democracy is justified. Harris likewise defended the media for covering up the Hunter Biden story lest it help Trump.

These people really do hate us. They really do want to stop us. One can see these people and very quickly believe they’ll try to steal an election or narrate the news in a way to undermine and oppose the right without giving the right a fair shake.

I frankly think Edward Luce’s comment, combined with Michael Hayden’s affirmation and Sam Harris’s defense of undermining democracy to save it does far more damage to the national discourse and direction of the country than anything Trump has done. Trump is, after all, a response to the right perceiving of the left that which Luce, Hayden, and Harris make plain. They hate us and do not want us to win and they will do everything possible to stop us.