Self-professed media expert and CNN pariah Brian Stelter came out with a thread this week that, unsurprisingly, was deeply critical of Fox News. This entails the coverage of the Rainbow Bridge car explosion incident from November 22. Fox News reporter Alexis McAdams, citing authorities, was detailing very early on that this was being looked at as an act of terrorism.
The FBI was initially called in, and sometime later in the day, the talk of this being a terrorist act was taken down, and then even later, the FBI pulled out and turned the matter over to local police. But Fox News became the focal point of disseminating false information. Soon, the network was blamed entirely for the false terrorism claim despite the one reality in this; note where McAdams was citing the words from the authorities.
Latching onto the narrative of Fox being fraudulent was Brian Stelter. He delivered his predictable pattern of critique of the network, stating essentially how this was par for Fox and its lack of diligence towards editorial oversight.
Big news outlets have standards and practices. They have processes for approving the use of anonymous sources. They have checks and balances. Fox mostly does not; thus, its claim about a Niagara Falls "terrorist attack" was rushed onto the air and online, wrongly and recklessly
— Brian Stelter (@brianstelter) November 22, 2023
This has long been the approach from the media guru, and there is all the more reason for him to dust off this script. Brian is making the rounds to hawk his latest book release; another hit job focused on Fox News. He was commissioned to write this as the court case with Dominion Voting Systems was set to commence, but once a settlement had been reached, he needed to shift the focus to broader issues with the network.
But what is notable most of all of this supposed media critic is how little criticism of the general media he conducts. Apart from Fox News, you do not hear much in the way of harsh words for the behavior seen by other news outlets. This is not a case of having fewer examples from the mainstream press. As we frequently see, whatever stern coverage is made of Fox, errors at the same time that are similar - if not identical - are occurring at the same time.
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First, look at the Rainbow Bridge incident. It was an emerging story with live coverage taking place. The same could be said of the recent reports from Gaza about Israel bombing a hospital, leading to 500 deaths on the scene. The reports, as we now know full well, were completely inaccurate. Yet the broad swath of news outlets that all jumped on the accusatory stance of Israel being responsible was stark. The hospital was not hit, the deaths on-site only numbered in the dozens, and the ordinance originated from inside Gaza.
Like the Fox News report in New York, this was a real-time reporting error, and yet the press complex that was on board with the reporting bears no scrutiny on the level that Fox is currently absorbing. Where is the accusation of Irresponsibility? Where are the criticisms of a lack of editorial oversight? This can not be deflected by saying, “Well, Fox consistently does this.”
It was just three days after the hospital story that the major news outlets - again - rushed to report on an Israeli “attack.” That time it was a Greek Orthodox church in Gaza that was allegedly hit and collapsed, with hundreds of residents sheltering inside. The following day, it was seen that the church was still intact, and the stories and the headlines were “evolving” once again. The BBC had to come out with a major retraction when it falsely reported Israel was targeting Arabs and medical staff at the al-Sharif hospital. The polar opposite was true; the Israelis brought in Arab speakers and medical staff.
That Stelter is not looking at the press complex in its entirety explains so much, given the numerous significant problems that have emerged in the past years. The Russian collusion fable was vastly reported for years, and to this day, there is little in the form of criticism leveled at those perpetrating the fraud. Stelter himself was pushing that tale, but when it was essentially debunked and its primary source exposed as a Russian operative, Brian was pleading ignorance.
The dark irony of this was later, when the Hunter Biden laptop was becoming a hot topic he dismissed that as “a classic example of the right-wing media machine”, all giving far more credence to the infamous intelligence community letter calling the laptop story Russian disinformation. When a false story of border agents whipping immigrants emerged, CNN was all over that story for a week, even continuing to discuss it after the facts were known it never took place.
On his then Sunday show, in the wake of this media malpractice, Brian had his ward, Oliver Darcy, on air to discuss the error-prone reporting. While they admitted to some journalism errors, they concluded that the press should be applauded for ultimately getting the story right and correcting the record.
Making this a further farce is when we realize this is nothing ever afforded to Fox News. When Fox corrects reports, it is regarded as an admission of guilt and cause for further scorn from Stelter, Darcy, and others. Fox getting facts wrong on an emerging live story is held up as an example of journalistic ethical lapses.
When numerous news outlets report inaccurately on an international incident, it is greeted with shrugs. Even as that falsified reporting leads to outbreaks of adverse activity across the globe, it is never held up as malicious behavior by the press. This lack of accountability is why trust in the media is at historic lows. It is also why Brian Stelter’s credibility is at a similar basement level.
This man claims to be covering the media complex as a whole, yet despite having copious amounts of content from media mistakes, he avoids serious mistakes with global ramifications. The fact that he obsessively focuses on one network alone proves he is not a media critic but a Fox obsessive.
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