So much for ‘Reliable Sources’!
As a crusty, curmudgeonly original CNN special assignment correspondent from the early 1980s, I have used these pages more than once to vent about the second-rate dingbats who have populated my old network over the past quarter-century.
You know them: cockwomble Chris Cuomo, blowhard Don Lemon, lumbering harpy Candy Crowley — a parade of television solemnity occasionally interrupted by journalism.
I spent enough of my career pulling leeches off myself in Nicaragua to admit I have an old-school correspondent’s prejudice against television interviews conducted in hermetically controlled studios.
But few CNN creatures trigger my counter-alimentation reflex faster than Brian Stelter, whose talent for institutional obsequiousness survived even the departure of his long-cashiered former boss, Jeff “Mother” Zucker.
Stelter was bounced during the Zucker debacle, then rehired in a fit of corporate dementia, and eventually returned to “Reliable Sources.” The title remains CNN’s best joke.
His latest exercise in reliability is a defense of NBC’s Kristen Welker after she characterized Donald Trump’s primary election endorsements as producing “mixed results.” The figures at issue were 100% of his endorsed Senate candidates winning and 98% of his other endorsed candidates winning. “Mixed” is doing some heroic work there.
Trump, unsurprisingly, was not amused. He made some noises about the “fine people” of the FCC taking a look at NBC’s news division.
Stelter initially jumped on X to declare the mystery solved in Welker’s favor:
And here’s the weirdest thing of all: Trump wrote that @kwelkernbc “just stated that Donald Trump has ‘mixed results’ on his Endorsements of Candidates” — but she said no such thing on today’s @MeetThePress. Where’d the quote come from? It’s baffling.
Then came the update: He found it. Welker had said “mixed” during a pre-show live shot on NBC’s Washington, D.C., affiliate, WRC-TV. Stelter noted that six Trump-backed House and gubernatorial candidates had lost their August primaries.
So much for “baffling.” The quote existed. The only real question was whether “mixed results” fairly described a batting average that would make Ted Williams rise from the grave and demand an audit.
Welker is free to characterize the record however she likes. First Amendment and all that. But viewers are equally free to notice when a journalist selects the one formulation that makes overwhelming success sound like a coin toss.
And there is some history here that Stelter’s defense neglects.
Go back to the “Meet the Press” interview in which Welker tangled with Orange Man Bad and got herself nuked.
I spent enough of my career ducking bullets in Grenada, pulling leeches off myself in Nicaragua, and dodging security thugs in Suriname to admit I have an old-school correspondent’s prejudice against television interviews conducted in hermetically controlled studios.
Welker was perfectly coiffed, made up, lighted, and wired through an IFB while a control room full of producers stood ready to help. Fine. That is television. But the polished setup made what happened next considerably funnier.
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After Trump cut the interview short, the grand inquisitor suddenly became the supplicant: “Mr. President, let’s please ...” Then came her complaint that she had traveled “all the way to Wisconsin” for the sit-down.
Trump later blasted Welker over the exchange. You do not need a degree in Freudian analysis to wonder whether being called stupid, cut off on camera, and reduced to pleading for a few more minutes might leave a residue.
“All the way” to Wisconsin! Did she walk there in the rain? Cross the Appalachians by mule? Ford Trimotor to Duluth, then Bactrian camel to Green Bay? Comcast has resources. Wisconsin is not Outer Mongolia.
NBC’s “best in the business” may well have no grudge at all. Perhaps “mixed results” simply struck her as the perfect phrase. But Stelter’s job, on a program called “Reliable Sources,” should be to examine that possibility rather than leap reflexively to the defense of a fellow establishment journalist.
Instead, he first declared Trump’s quotation baffling, then discovered it was real, then carried on as if the important fact were that six endorsed candidates had lost rather than that nearly all had won.
That is not media criticism so much as reputation management with a chyron.
So Brian the Obsequious rides again, defending the guild and ignoring the obvious context. As I said: So much for “Reliable Sources.”
Stephen Maturen/Getty Images
Photo by Stephen Maturen/Getty Images
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