New CNN’s Obliviously Slanted Approach Looks a Lot Like the Old CNN

When Brian Stelter was fired from CNN a couple of years ago, conservatives celebrated his misfortune. And when he was rehired by the network earlier this week, they let out a collective groan, not to mention indulged in a number of personal attacks from which this author would like to disassociate himself.

Still, there is good reason for the groans. Stelter spent the duration of his stint at CNN presenting himself as not just a media critic, but the authority on good journalism. From his perch at Reliable Sources, Stelter reliably heaped scorn on “right-wing media” while ignoring the pathologies within the left-wing “mainstream” media. Indeed, Stelter often embodied those pathologies.

For a few examples: There was the time he rushed to call the Hunter Biden laptop story a “manufactured scandal” and “classic example of the right-wing media machine”; the time when he manufactured his own scandal by somberly asking “What does [Vladimir] Putin have on [Donald] Trump?” There was the time he chided conservative media for reporting accurately on the Jussie Smollett hate crime hoax; the time he hyped up professional scumbag Michael Avenatti as a presidential candidate; the time he went to bat for the largely discredited Steele Dossier; the time he gloated about CNN getting away smearing a high school student; and the time he declared that it made “no sense” to object to the use of the 1619 Project in K-12 schools.

In one particularly preposterous moment, he complained that “entire media companies essentially exist to tear down Joe Biden.”

My brother in Christ, wait until you find out what every prominent Republican since time immemorial has had to contend with.

I bring all of this up not to dunk on Stelter, but to once again point out that CNN is slouching back into its Trump-obsessed 2017-2021 form. During his short tenure at the helm of the network, Chris Licht sought to repair the considerable reputational damage CNN had done to itself throughout this period. He made many strategic missteps, but directionally he was right. Turning into MSNBC-lite might have had short-term benefits, but it was a long-term death sentence.

Post-Licht, they’ve returned to seeking out the fleeting rewards of partisan fan-service instead of the the harder-earned, but more edifying trust of a broad-based audience

Brianna Keilar delivers haughty speeches about the importance of honoring military service of any kind in one breath before denigrating J.D. Vance’s in the next. Jim Acosta‘s morning news show is just a left-wing version of Harris Faulkner’s on Fox News. Jamie Gangel used the hours after Trump was shot to complain that he had shouted “Fight! Fight! Fight!” in the immediate aftermath of almost being murdered. And its few conservative contributors are reliably ganged up on by its small army of Democratic drones.

In perhaps the most glaring example of the network sinking back into the worst version of itself, Dana Bash ran her interview with Vice President Kamala Harris — the first of Harris’s no longer nascent campaign — more like a co-host of The View than as a hard-hitting journalist.

Earlier this year, Harris smeared Special Counsel Robert Hur as a “politically-motivated” actor lacking in “integrity” when he accurately described the 81-year-old president’s condition. Now, Harris has secured a major party’s presidential nomination because Hur was proven correct. So how did Bash approach the subject during her sit-down with the woman who wants to run executive branch?

By asking: “When he [Biden] called you and said he was pulling outta the race, what was that like?”

No questions about about Biden’s condition, no questions about Harris’s credibility, just “What was that like?”

She doubled down on turning what should have been a grilling into a game of teeball by closing it with a pair of puff questions directed at Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz. Those human interest inquires might be appropriate for a candidate who had articulated a clear policy agenda, submitted to a wide variety of interviews, and gone through an arduous primary process. Harris has done none of those things and her short, 27-minute conversation may end up being one of the only times the American people see her subjected to scrutiny before election day. Bash’s failure to hold her feet to the fire did her audience a disservice — and is a symptom of CNN’s decision to fall back into its worst habits.

And in case you might think Bash is just too nice to be tough on her, take a moment to survey her recent interviews with Vance and Tulsi Gabbard. Behold, as it turns out, Bash is more than capable of holding her interlocutors to account — when she wants to.

All of this comes with a disclaimer: Of course the GOP and right-wing media are full of their own pathologies, and of course they’re worthy of attention. But CNN’s myopic focus on that and decision to pivot from the short-lived Licht era in the most self-indulgent way imaginable does not speak well of it.

As the network’s chief media analyst, Stelter could make his second chance at CNN worthwhile. If he holds it and its peers to the same standard he holds conservatives.

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.