CNN host Brian Stelter appeared on C-SPAN's Washington Journal on Tuesday morning to promote his anti-Trump/anti-Fox News book Hoax. Callers were mostly hostile, including a guy who was cut off for calling Stelter "Humpty Dumpty" -- a favorite Hannity nickname.
The most serious caller was a Lakeland, Minnesota man who calmly told Stelter CNN was "the enemy of the truth." He suggested recent polling suggests far fewer people believe the news media provides factual information than they did back in the era of Walter Cronkite.
MINNESOTA CALLER: You guys always talk about how many times Trump has lied. I have calculated that I think with your chyrons -- I don't know if there is any journalists left at CNN but I know that if I were to estimate, about 300 different distortions or misinformation that we get out of CNN and you have to watch them in the airport, which is harsh!
But if you added all that up to 46 months, it comes out to be 300,000 plus distortions of truth. So my thing here is that you guys, this is how low you will go, is that you went out and made lies, and you defamed a child and then you had to settle out of court to pay this child for distorting information about this young individual [Nick Sandmann].
So I would say if anything that's happening at CNN, anybody who buys your book, it's really just one of those things that is dividing our nation, and I don't believe in dividing our nation. It hurts our great nation, and so CNN is really the enemy of the truth, and that's my opinion, thank you.
Stelter skipped over the Sandmann settlement, and lamented conservatives have been "radicalized" by "media-bashing." By NewsBusters! It makes us sound like al-Qaeda, and yet no one is the enemy, he says:
STELTER: I’m grateful for the call, and I know you are not the only person that feels this way. There has been a process of radicalization that’s happened in this country, with media-bashing that is absolutely unprecedented.
You know, 20-30 years ago, conservatives talked about media bias and there were some really valid points to that critique. It is absolutely true that lots of journalists are based in new York and Washington, they’re based in big cities, they have liberal leanings. And mainstream newsrooms are built to make sure that bias does not seep into the news coverage and yet, sometimes it does. I absolutely acknowledge that. I think it’s different to talk about things as if they’re enemies. No one is an enemy of another American. No news outlet is an enemy of America.
The LOL moment of the hour -- the time I probably scared our cats -- was when a Texas caller smartly challenged Stelter's multitudinous anonymous sources in his book, and then asked "How did CNN spiral down to the absolute level of Trump hate that they are?"
Stelter played dumb, as he often does when CNN's incessant anti-Trump bias is called out. "Who hates Trump? I don't hate Trump."
