After CEO Chris Licht began to take stock of the mess he’d acquired over at CNN, one of the first moves he made was to boot Brian Stelter and cancel his show, “Reliable Sources” back in August 2022.
Where did he go after getting the boot, after acting like a Democratic operative?
Stelter was named a Harvard Kennedy School’s Walter Shorenstein Media and Democracy Fellow, to “work with both students and faculty during the Fall of 2022.”
“As the Walter Shorenstein Fellow, Stelter will convene a series of discussions about threats to democracy and the range of potential responses from the news media. These discussions with media leaders, policy makers, politicians, and Kennedy School students, fellows, and faculty will help deepen public and scholarly understanding about the current state of the information ecosystem and its impacts on democratic governance,” the school noted.
Imagine anyone thinking that Stelter was an authority on anything, much less “threats to democracy.” What are the chances that he was talking about BLM/Antifa in those “threats,” the weaponization of the federal government against the people, or the media aligning itself with a political party to push their narrative? I’m guessing none of those topics came up in whatever nonsense he was pushing.
But this week, Stelter is involved elsewhere — at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Guess what he’s doing there? He’s on a WEF panel warning about, “The Clear and Present Danger of Disinformation.”
Is he there teaching about how to spread disinformation?
A.G. Sulzberger is the chairman of the NY Times. He claims that disinformation is “the most existential” challenge we’re grappling with as a society.
Maybe “trust declines” because the American people can no longer trust the media to print the truth and not take a side. Maybe Sulzberger should examine why millions no longer trust the NY Times.
Listen as Stelter can’t stop talking about President Donald Trump and claims he lied, yet Stelter then deems as good Democrats pressuring social media “to be stronger in content moderation” [crack down on speech].
Rep. Seth Moulton (D-MA) said, “Well, I think this is the question of ultimately what we’re trying to achieve there is some measure of public safety.” Moulton then blames “misinformation” for not being able to “get people to take a COVID vaccine.”
Um, guys? That’s calling for government censorship — do you even listen to yourselves? If you can’t convince people to get a vaccine, that’s on you, the failure of what you are saying. It doesn’t justify cracking down on the speech of people who disagree with you. Then, of course, we get to the question of who gets to decide what “misinformation” is — the media and politicians on the left have been replete with all kinds of misinformation over the past couple of years, but that was “okay” to them and not censored or suppressed because they were the folks who controlled the social media organs. Now that there’s at least one media organ — Twitter — that is not under their control, they have to start talking about cracking down on speech.
Questioning speech, and calling things “fake news” is bad, according to Sulzberger.
No, the problem isn’t questioning speech, the problem was the fascism and Communism shutting down opponents and their speech.
Věra Jourová of the European Commission for Values and Transparency took it a little further talking about “illegal hate speech,” saying, “You will have soon also in [the] U.S. I think…”
Stelter asks Moulton about the U.S. doing what Europe has done to crack down on speech. Moulton claims we have “a lot to learn” from Europe, “They’re way ahead of us in that regard.” He does give a nod to concerns for free speech — he was a Marine, so he took something away from that. But we’ve already seen Democrats trying to do exactly that — follow Europe — trying to censor speech they don’t like under the umbrella of “misinformation” and/or “hate speech.” We saw Sen. Ben Cardin (D-MD) citing, approvingly, Europe, saying we needed to act “aggressively” to go after “hate speech” on social media. We saw Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) endorsing subjecting social media companies to “hefty lawsuits” to force them to “do something” about misinformation. We also saw the office of Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) going after a journalist to shut down what he was saying claiming he was pushing “conspiracies” because he was reporting on things that exposed Schiff.
This is the kind of thing they’re talking about at the WEF and that isn’t a conspiracy. This is where they think things are moving. That should concern us all.