CNN is back to its sanctimonious schtick about holding truth to the power of the presidency, even after spending the last four years serving as the president’s unofficial communications shop.
This started with a leaked confidential “low confidence” intelligence memo that seemingly undermined the Trump administration’s characterization of its strikes on Iran. The memo was reported by CNN’s Natasha Bertrand, who has proven in the past to lack credibility as a reporter. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and President Donald Trump both ripped the reporting.
CNN’s top mascots then jumped on their high horses to defend their network and boast about how brave and important they are. Brian Stelter stated that “it is quite patriotic to ask these questions and hold the government to account.” He also posted the following: “History is replete with proof that it’s imperative to ask for evidence of presidential assertions. It is necessary – and patriotic – to question official accounts; to wonder if the public is being misled; and to do so regardless of which party is in power.”
Jake Tapper did the same, saying on air, “Asking questions is literally our job. Demanding facts and answers — instead of just taking a president’s word for it.” CNN is just full of honest, dedicated reporters who pursue the facts no matter who they anger, according to CNN.
The problem is that everyone can see how inauthentic this routine is. Tapper just took the president’s word for it when that President was Joe Biden, which is why he threw a tantrum when Lara Trump noticed that Biden’s cognitive abilities were in decay. Tapper spent years defending Biden and dismissing concerns about his cognitive decline, only co-writing a book about the cover-up after Democrats lost the White House in 2024.
Stelter’s record is just as bad. He said that videos showing Biden wandering about were “distorted, out-of-context videos chopped up in certain ways, that’s what we’re seeing.” He called the Hunter Biden laptop story “disinformation” because that was the “assertion” from the biased former intelligence officials that Bertrand used in her coverage of it. His “patriotic” questions to then-White House press secretary Jen Psaki, who misled the country from the beginning about Biden’s cognitive state? “What do you think the press gets wrong when covering Biden’s agenda?” and “what’s your advice” to journalists “about trying to stay close to the truth in this world of lies?”
BRIAN STELTER SAYS ‘HOURS-OLD’ VIDEOS CONTRIBUTE TO ‘FALSE IMPRESSION’ OF LA RIOTS
Stelter and Tapper were among the liberal journalists refusing to ask some of the most basic questions about Biden’s health, taking the president and his team at their word and not wondering “if the public is being misled.” When a Republican is president, asking questions is a patriotic obligation, a necessity for democracy to function. When a Democrat is president, the question is, in Stelter’s words, “What do you think we get wrong?” That is precisely why CNN is not a credible journalistic enterprise.