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Stelter Has a New Home But His Old Job

Brad Slager
Brad Slager  |  Apr 13, 2023
The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of Townhall.com.

04.13.23

Reporting on the Mirror – VANITY FAIR

  • The drought of critical Fox News coverage will soon end!

The mystery of where Brian Stelter was going to end up can finally be solved, at least on an interim basis. This week, the deposed media maven announced he has agreed to join Vanity Fair as – what else – their designated Fox News correspondent. He is hired on to cover the defamation trial involving the network.

To go along with that, Stelter also reports his obsession will be further fueled as his publisher has agreed for him to write a follow-up tome about Fox after his 2020 release "Hoax."

Anti-Social Media – PUBLIC BROADCASTING SERVICE

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The announcement today came down that PBS has declared they – like their radio brethren at NPR – would be leaving Twitter. This is believed to be impactful and dramatic – we have to assume.

What remains to be seen is whether anyone will truly notice. In looking through the timeline of the PBS account, it appears there was not a tremendous amount of active interest in what they were posting about their programming.

For a site with more than two million followers, most of their posts would generate a few dozen LIKES and only a handful of retweets.

Both Kinds of Standards – ASSOCIATED PRESS

  • When employing executive power turns bad.

The AP delivers a cautionary tale of sorts about the type of leadership we could expect from Ron DeSantis were he to ascend into the White House. In a lengthy piece on the governor's tendency to – well, govern – it seems to serve as a warning should we elect him in 2024.

Of course, we heard no such concern when the actual president of the United States swept into office and signed a record amount of EOs in his first week at the Resolute Desk.

Body Checking the Fact-Checkers – POLITIFACT

PolitiFact decided to rectify their error of delivering a TRUE rating on Ron DeSantis recently, so they had to concoct a new assessment on another comment. Regarding how the governor commented on Martha's Vineyard deciding to remove the immigrants he sent to their idyllic isle within a day, PolitiFact jumped on his use of the word "deported."

DeSantis said when migrants arrived on Martha’s Vineyard, 'They called out the National Guard and deported them within 24 hours.' The migrants were relocated to a Cape Cod military base and were not removed from the United States. They remain in the U.S. today.

Just to get petty, since they choose to whittle semantics here, "deport" does not mean exclusively to expel from a country. It can also mean "to remove and relocate." But even if we go along with the claim, it is clear what DeSantis meant in his comment, a reality PolitiFact did not want to address. If you want to say he used an incorrect word, he did not claim they were sent out of the country, so his quote could have been graded as "mostly true" or even "half true." But no, by hinging the entire report on that lone word, he earns the grade of FALSE.

Pounce of Prevention – POLITICO

President Jose Biden has a dream to have everyone in the US driving electric vehicles, so he is proposing new standards to provoke the automakers to ramp up the development of these cars and trucks. One way will be to put stringent new rules on the fuel industry to "coax" people into buying EVs. With this in the works, Politico sees that GOP opposition is going to be a problem.

President Joe Biden’s attempt to force automobile companies to supercharge the supply of electric vehicles could spur a huge fight with the oil and gas industry — and provoke a partisan feeding frenzy from Republicans looking for their next gas-stoves-style culture war.

So, for those of you scoring in your programs – even though it is Biden and the Dems who want to impose restrictions on the energy sector, the auto manufacturers, and every American who drives, it is the Republicans who are engaging in a culture war on this issue.