CNN’s Brian Stelter took his anti-Donald Trump bias to new heights Sunday during his show “Reliable Souses,” where he argued that the media had to start referring to the president-elect as an authoritarian. “I talk to international correspondents who say to you, ‘This is exactly what authoritarians do. This is what strongmen do. This is what happens in authoritarian regimes,’” he claimed, “I think we need to start using those words on TV, at least, to discuss the possibilities before us.”
“What you do in an authoritarian regime is you delegitimize the press,” he continued, as he asked former Fortune editor John Huey if he could see Trump cracking down on the press. Huey agreed and said that Trump practices “the classic techniques of a demagogue.” And according to him, one of the techniques is “to create the idea that someone out there is the enemy.”
“And he started with Mexicans, he moved to Muslims, and sometime in the middle of the summer he really started to focus on the media,” Huey explained, while praising Stelter for being, “one of the first people to pick up on that.” Come to think of it, Hillary Clinton’s claim that Trump’s supporters were a basket of deplorables falls into that narrative.
Huey continued to smear Trump by surmising that, “So these are demagogic techniques and you can look at them very seriously because they do smack of authoritarianism.” He went on to mock Trump reminding that panel “This is the first president-elect we've ever had who is in the Pro Wrestling Hall of Fame. So there are elements of promotion here.”
The CNN host had George Washington University professor and former CNN Washington Bureau Chief, Frank Senso, on the program where Stelter inquired, “Frank, is that what you tell your journalism students, that this is the prime time to become a journalist because there's a lot to investigate?” Senso then ranted:
Well, yeah. I tell them it's an important time to become a journalist, even though journalism itself is under siege, even though the media as we know it is so fractured and disaggregated, that's going to continue. But we're going to need people who are truth tellers. We’re going to need people who are story tellers. We’re going to need people who are go out on all platforms and convey real information, not fake information, not phonyed information, not distorted information.
But that’s what the media had been peddling for decades, including CNN. Stelter himself tried to spread fake information when he claimed NewsBusters was fake news site. And Stelter tried to distort information when he tried to discredit an Associated Press investigation that exposed how Secretary Clinton gave special access to her foundation donors.