OPINION:
Inviting CNN’s chief media correspondent to a conference aimed at combating disinformation may sound like asking Bonnie and Clyde for advice on stopping bank robberies, but that’s exactly what happened at the University of Chicago last week.
At a symposium titled, “Disinformation and the Erosion of Democracy,” Brian Stelter, host of CNN’s ironically named “Reliable Sources” show, held forth as though he is a kind of warrior, fighting an endless battle to stop fake news from getting airtime.
“Through it all, I think the theme is ‘what’s real and what’s not, what’s reliable and what’s not,’” Mr. Stelter mused during a panel discussion. “I find as we talk about disinformation, there are so many examples that we can all agree are awful and clearly wrong.”
He was given an immediate chance to atone for CNN’s sins in that area when University of Chicago freshman Christopher Phillips rose to ask a question specifically about Mr. Stelter’s network.
“They push the Russian collusion hoax, they push the Jussie Smollett hoax, they smear Justice Kavanaugh as a rapist, and they also smeared Nick Sandmann as a white supremacist. And yes, they dismissed the Hunter Biden laptop affair as pure Russian disinformation,” began Mr. Phillips, who writes for a conservative student publication called The Chicago Thinker. “With mainstream corporate journalists becoming little more than apologists and cheerleaders for the regime, is it time to finally declare that the canon of journalistic ethics is dead or no longer operative?”
But Mr. Phillips wasn’t finished.
“All the mistakes of the mainstream media, and CNN in particular, seem to magically all go in one direction,” he said. “Are we expected to believe that this is all just some sort of random coincidence? Or is there something else behind it?”
Mr. Stelter’s immediate reaction was to buy time by making a joke — “It’s too bad, it’s time for lunch!” — before denying any responsibility for disinformation at all, even though he said that news outlets should admit when mistakes are made.
“I think you’re describing a different channel than the one that I watch,” he said. “But I understand that that is a popular right-wing narrative about CNN.”
Sometimes narratives form because there is ample evidence to support them, as is the case with CNN’s obvious political bias. And Mr. Stelter made no attempt to defend CNN’s coverage of the stories listed in the student’s question, nor did he admit that he has pushed false storylines on those topics as well.
At another point in the conference, The Atlantic’s Anne Applebaum was asked by Daniel Schmidt, another freshman writer from The Chicago Thinker, about Hunter Biden’s infamous laptop.
As most everyone knows by now, the laptop belonging to President Biden’s son contained emails and other documents detailing the web of lucrative foreign business deals Hunter landed by trading on his father’s power. The New York Post’s initial reporting on the laptop in October 2020 was suppressed by social media platforms and either ignored or scorned as “Russian disinformation” by the Biden campaign and most of the media. A year and a half later, major news outlets like The New York Times and The Washington Post have confirmed the authenticity of the computer and its contents.
Mr. Schmidt asked Ms. Applebaum if the media had erred when it quickly dismissed the laptop.
“My problem with Hunter Biden’s laptop is, I think it’s totally irrelevant. I mean, it’s not whether it’s disinformation,” Ms. Applebaum said. “I mean, I didn’t think Hunter Biden’s business relationships have anything to do with who should be president of the United States.”
This is dishonest on at least two levels.
First, it was very much the collective position of the corporate media that the laptop was wholly a Russian disinformation operation, which was a lie fed by a now-discredited letter signed by dozens of former intelligence officers.
Along those lines, Ms. Applebaum herself wrote a column for The Atlantic about Russian disinformation in March 2021, in which she celebrated that the “Hunter Biden saga” had been successfully suppressed.
Second, Hunter’s emails and text messages tend to directly implicate Joe Biden as being aware of, involved in the approval of, and financially compensated through his son’s shady business deals. That is clearly relevant to a candidate’s fitness for the presidency.
Ms. Applebaum not only failed to acknowledge mischaracterizing the laptop, she also invented a new excuse for that error.
Journalists who are unwilling to admit that they’ve misreported major stories hardly have standing to lecture anyone else on the perils of disinformation.
The stated purpose of the University of Chicago’s symposium was to discuss stopping the dissemination of false or warped versions of news. The problem was that some of the featured experts have been among the worst offenders.
• Tim Murtaugh is a Washington Times columnist and the founder and principal of Line Drive Public Affairs, a communication consulting firm.
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