Brian Stelter sought to hold US far right accountable. He made some powerful enemies

As a media analyst, Stelter emerged as a frequent critic of Trump and Fox News

Brian Stelter, the host of CNN’s Reliable Sources, is leaving the network after nine years, and the show will be taken off the air.

NPR first reported the news on Thursday (18 August) citing Stelter himself.

A CNN spokesperson confirmed to The Independent that Reliable Sources will end on Sunday 21 August, and that “as a result Brian Stelter will leave the company.” “We appreciate his contributions to the network and wish him well as he embarks on new endeavors,” the spokesperson added in a statement.

Stelter told NPR: “It was a rare privilege to lead a weekly show focused on the press at a time when it has never been more consequential.”

A graduate of Towson University, Stelter began his career in media as a blogger, and by learning how to code. “I coded my way in[to journalism],” he told Politico in 2018, “back when coding just meant learning basic HTML. I built web sites starting around age 11. First about books, then about video games, then about TV news. Eventually I blogged my way into a job at The New York Times.”

Stelter joined The New York Times in 2007 as a media reporter. He left for CNN in 2013, joining the network as a senior media correspondent and host of Reliable Sources.

After his departure, in August 2020, Stelter contributed an opinion piece to The New York Times – an analysis of Donald Trump’s use of the word “hoax” – which marked the release of Stelter’s second book, Hoax: Donald Trump, Fox News, and the Dangerous Distortion of Truth. (Stelter’s first book, Top of the Morning: Inside the Cutthroat World of Morning TV, came out in 2013.)

The book and the opinion piece reflected the direction of Stelter’s work at Reliable Sources. Over the years, Stelter, through his media analysis, emerged as a frequent critic of Trump and Fox News.

Following the news of Stelter’s departure from CNN, The New York Times deemed it a “striking change” on the part of Chris Licht, who became CNN’s chairman and CEO earlier this year. The newspaper’s Benjamin Mullin said the ongoing direction at CNN, which has involved seeking “more straight new reporting and fewer opinionated takes from hosts”, seemed to put Stelter “in possible jeopardy.”

During and following Trump’s presidency, Stelter used his position as a media analyst to point out Trump’s lies and deconstruct his and his supporters’ rhetoric.

“I believe that we’ll all look back someday and recognize that the Trump presidency was a rolling, ongoing crisis,” he told Politico in 2018. “I always think back to what Reince Priebus told Chris Whipple about White House chaos: ‘Take everything you’ve heard and multiply it by 50.’ There’s obviously a crisis of credibility, and has been since day one. But there also seems to be a crisis of competency. And there’s a pro-Trump media army that is in denial about all that. So I just keep trying to come up with new ways to cover this — and convey the stakes of it all — on Reliable Sources.”

In his 2020 New York Times op-ed, Stelter wrote that Trump “has shouted ‘hoax’ hundreds of times, about everything from climate change to Supreme Court rulings to impeachment.”

“At this point,” Stelter added, “[Trump’s] copious claims about hoaxes add up to a hoax. And through the history of his use of this single word, we can see how he has fooled his biggest fans but failed to persuade almost everyone else.” He then wrote: “If you want to understand why a minority of American voters are unplugged from the fact-based news that the rest of the country depends on, just imagine being told multiple times a day that real news is a hoax.”

A recent Reliable Sources segment featured Stelter analyzing Trump’s framing of the FBI search of his Mar-a-Lago home in Palm Beach, Florida.

“Trump announced that the search had happened. He set his narrative through a statement right away, and then his preferred media outlets ran with that for days and for days,” Stelter said. “He’s had his lawyers on television. He essentially has the airwaves dominated with his storylines, while the Justice Department was relatively quiet. ... So if you choose to live in that Trump information universe, you are hearing one thing over and over and over again: that he is under attack, and thus you are under attack.”

Stelter’s work has placed him in the crosshairs of conservative commentators such as Fox News’s Tucker Carlson and Greg Gutfeld. Russell Brand also mocked Stelter on his YouTube channel as a representative of “the mainstream media.”

After the news of Reliable Sources’ ending broke, Stelter tweeted: “I loved anchoring @ReliableSources. It was a rare privilege to lead a weekly show focused on the press at a time when it has never been more consequential. And here's the thing... We’re going to do it one more time. One more show. This Sunday morning. The small but mighty producing team is working on bookings and ideas right now. I am in awe of their talent and I am going to do everything I can to help them find new roles.”

The final broadcast of Reliable Sources will air on Sunday 21August at 11am ET.