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He wrote a book, “ Hoax,” about Fox News and Trump-“a long, sordid, cheerless, and endlessly dishy narrative,” according to Kirkus Reviews. His show and newsletter were understandably, given his media beat, devoted to Trump’s war on the press. Jake Tapper gained resistance-Twitter fame in a profile, GQ lauded him for “his skill at shutting down a Trump-crony filibuster.” But no CNN personality took on the fight against Trump’s disinformation more gamely than Stelter. The reporter Jim Acosta used his ban by the Trump White House (undemocratic, of course) as a career springboard, indulging in self-admitted “grandstanding” and writing a whole book about it. But Zucker’s CNN cynically-and, one might say, with no moral judgment attached, brilliantly-turned the battle for press freedom and truth into a brand opportunity. Most news organizations came around to calling the Trump Administration’s lies and obfuscations lies and obfuscations.

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Unkindly, the author and dubious-sourcer extraordinaire Michael Wolff once told Stelter to his face, on the man’s own TV show, “While you’re a nice guy, you’re full of sanctimony.”

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Stelter’s reverence for, and professional devotion to, the news media set the stage for what can kindly be referred to as his Trump-era campaign against disinformation. You could snicker at his zealousness in covering every banal bit of the news business, sometimes lacking a certain acuity or charm, but you had to give it to him on sheer hustle. Perhaps it’s because of his Horatio Alger qualities though lacking the irony gene so prized by many media types, Stelter made his way to the top by pecking out stories large and small. The outsider had turned consummate insider.ĭespite the fame-and a lucrative spot in the former CNN boss Jeff Zucker’s stable of stars-an essential earnestness has always been Stelter’s trademark. (CNN has said that it will continue the newsletter sans Stelter.) A 2013 book he wrote about the morning-show wars wouldn’t win any literary prizes-“a snark-infused, twitchy, Twitter-generation writing style uneasily applied to long-form journalism,” according to the Times-but it did provide the basis for Apple’s “ The Morning Show,” starring Reese Witherspoon and Jennifer Aniston. During a nine-year tenure at CNN, Stelter hosted the network’s long-running media franchise “Reliable Sources,” and his daily newsletter-a mass of text with musings on the biggest stories, news bites, and job announcements that hits in-boxes late every night-remained essential reading well before the Substack craze. As it turned out, the cherubic young man in “Page One” aspired to be part of the slick, savage TV world he covered. Unlike Nick Denton and Jonah Peretti, who started their own novel media entities (Gawker and BuzzFeed, respectively), or John Harris and Jim VandeHei, who left the Washington Post to found Politico, a souped-up version of the paper’s politics section, Stelter didn’t want to run his own shop. Stelter took a different path from other early Internet-media figures. This Thursday, the network announced Stelter’s departure, one year into a four-year contract, signalling a pivot as it moves to reshape its reputation. Two years later, he was hired by CNN to be a senior media correspondent and host a weekly Sunday show. He is a precocious kid in baggy khakis, working frenetically, his ambition telegraphed by his devotion to his BlackBerry. “Page One,” a 2011 documentary about the Times, captures the early-career Stelter, two computer screens on his desk, evangelizing about Twitter. He was the upstart blogger who, at the age of twenty-one, became a reporter for the Times. Stelter has been a ubiquitous presence in news ever since, bridging the gap between the old Internet-the one that allowed a college student, from a state school in Maryland, to insert himself into New York media-and the new, more corporate version. The incongruity of a teen-ager, ardently devoted to the banalities of TV’s ups and downs, becoming essential was oddly charming.

Several months after his blog launched, the New York Times ran a brief article about it, revealing the nerdy obsessive behind the site and lingering on the fact that it had become a must-read for television’s glossiest journalists and executives. He initially published anonymously Stelter feared his age would curb the growing readership of his site. In 2004, Brian Stelter was an eighteen-year-old freshman at Towson University when he started a blog about the cable-news industry.