Media Criticism and The Cruel Summer of 2022
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Its been a cruel, cruel summer for media criticism in 2022. “Wow, three different voices who exited in three very different ways, but losing the media criticism of Eric Boehlert, Margaret Sullivan and now Brian Stelter in a matter of months is quite a blow,” tweeted Will Bunch, echoing a lot of the sentiment in the room of media geeks, such as yours truly.
Yesterday, CNN's Reliable Sources with Brian Stelter was cancelled. The weekly media analysis show that has aired in various iterations for three decades will have its last episode this Sunday. Reliable Sources premiered in 1992, and, like CNN itself , was a byproduct of the First Persian Gulf War, growing out of the conversations journalists had about covering that controversial war. And so, a new cable network with hours and hours of free time to fill minted a show about Media talking about Media. I pretty much watched the show every week, worked briefly as a colleague with Stelter at Mediabistro over a decade ago, and saw him once or twice at media panels in New York City.
Stelter anchored the show for nine of the last 30 years, asking provocative questions of Establishmentarians, as well as newspapermen and women and people affected by media coverage. Under Stelter’s watch Reliable Sources covered the rise of misinformation and the growing influence of Big Tech, two of the biggest media developments in the history of media, quite frankly. And he was up to the job. He was a frequent critic of the Trump administration, and drew the ire of both Trump loyalists on the right and the Progressives, who found him to be insufficiently leftish. "It was a rare privilege to lead a weekly show focused on the press at a time when it has never been more consequential," he said in a statement to CNN Business.
Brian Stelter is a consummate media insider, who started as an undergraduate blogger of the television news, went on to work for the New York Times, then anchored a media criticism show on CNN. But even as an insider, he did not begin at the fashionable ivy league schools, or even the elite private colleges favored by most of the chattering classes. Instead, he went to Towson University in Maryland, and rose through hard work and a genuine obsession with the business of information (not through connections).
As a result, Reliable Sources had a higher concentration of guests that come from what is crudely referred to as “flyover country” by Establishment journalists. He favored straight-shooters like David Zurawik, a professor in Goucher College’s Communication & Media Studies department, to the usual suspects from the LA-NY-DC beltway.
The Tucker Carlson crowd, of course, is cackling with delight. On Twitter — which fairly teems with journalists and media types — the praise from his colleagues is voluminous, as has been the shadenfreude from his enemies on the right. “This is a terrible move by CNN. Brian Stelter was the symbol of a media establishment willing to question itself,” Dan Froomkin, editor of Press Watch told Forbes. “He was a flawed but essential voice in the national media. His firing is a win for all the wrong people.”
And although there were heavy doses of CEOs and professional talking heads on the show every Sunday, Stelter also regularly had on dissenting voices speaking truth to power, like Amy Goodman and Katrina VanDen Heuvel. I once asked Brian why he didn’t have Goodman, particularly, on more often at a panel a few years ago and he responded, “she’s difficult to get in contact with,” leaving me with the impression that he would have liked to have had the independent journalist on more often. In 2015, The Weather Channel’s Sam Champion and his husband Reubem Robierb discussed being gay, married and part of the media, which was noteworthy. Finally, my favorite Reliable Sources guest of all time was TV royalty, Norman Lear. You could feel the excitement of a media junkie like Brian talking to a titan in the media business since before he was even born.
Whether for the reason of cost-cutting, or the politics of it all, CNN is losing an important organic connection to its founding in the cancellation of this show. And, even more importantly, in Brian Stelter, CNN is losing a respected voice of institutional self-criticism.