Former CNN host Brian Stelter is trying to rewrite the history of the 2020 election and the Hunter Biden laptop story.
Appearing on a podcast this week, Stelter said CNN never labeled the laptop story as misinformation and defended the way CNN and other news organizations treated the story.
It’s a good reminder that CNN was right to fire Stelter and that he has no business being in the news business.
Fox News reported:
Brian Stelter defends 2020 media coverage of Hunter Biden laptop story: We never labeled it ‘misinformation’
Stelter acknowledged that if Twitter “screwed up” in censoring the laptop story, “we should go after Twitter.” But at the time he offered a full justification for how CNN and other media outlets handled the Biden scandal.
“I’ve seen newsrooms look around and say, ‘We don’t have a laptop. We don’t have evidence. We don’t have evidence that this is true. And we know there are reasons to wonder if this is disinformation,'” Stelter said.
“A lot of the lies that happen now about what happened in 2020 are like this – they say, ‘All this ahs, they all called it disinformation!’ That’s not true,” Stelter continued. “A lot of us wondered, we said out loud, ‘Could it be?’ We said ‘some former US officials think it might’, it’s always cushioned – it’s not always, it’s usually cushioned that way. And now in retrospect, two years later, three years later, people like partisans like to pretend it was labeled misinformation, which it wasn’t. There was anxiety. There is reason to be concerned, not because of the Hillary emails, but because of the Russian effort in 2016.
Krakauer pushed back, citing an infamous letter from former Intel officials that claimed the Hunter Biden emails shared by the Post had “classic hallmarks of a Russian information operation,” stressing that they were “essentially” telling Americans that it was disinformation. He said the double standard the media has with the approach to the Russia investigation and that an anonymously-sourced story about the Mueller investigation from The New York Times or The Washington Post fueled “the entire news cycle” but not the New York Post’s Hunter Biden story.
The former “Reliable Sources” host tried to pick apart the comparison, claiming there were “a lot of problems” with the various circumstances behind the New York Post’s report, and “Uncovered” writers admitting there were some “red flags.”
What was not mentioned in the exchange between Stelter and Krakauer was that CNN’s top executives were spiking the laptop story in leaked recordings of the network’s editorial calls shortly after the New York Post first published its bombshell report.
Stelter is such a dishonest hack.
February 2023: Stelter defends 2020 media coverage of Hunter Biden laptop story: ‘We didn’t label it ‘misinformation’ – Stelter in October 2020 after the Hunter laptop story broke: “We know it’s the right example – a wing media machine.” https://t.co/bXWQ1g3rPH
— Joe Concha (@JoeConchaTV) February 25, 2023
Bri Bri called it misinformation, but his network has repeatedly used the word “debunked” in relation to the laptop.
– Keith Bergin – Toxic Something Podcast (@KeithBergin) February 25, 2023
No one should be surprised @BrianStelter Continues dishonestly. https://t.co/9jhC32tmu4
– Pradeep J. Shankar (@Neoavatara) February 25, 2023
Stelter should never be let near a newsroom again.
