HBO hires ‘king of fake news’ Brian Stelter from CNN to produce documentary on… the dangers of fake news

If you were making a documentary on fake news and wanted to get journalists involved behind the scenes, there are a few people you may want to avoid. One of those is CNN host Brian Stelter.

The HBO network is rightly being mocked for putting Stelter – the host of a CNN show ironically named ‘Reliable Sources’ – on the team for an upcoming documentary on fake news. 

According to Stelter himself, the documentary will investigate “disinformation and the cost of fake news.” The film, for which Stelter was executive producer, will dive into “how post-truth culture has become an increasingly dangerous part of the global information environment,” according to WarnerMedia. 

To say Stelter’s involvement in the documentary attracted mockery online would be an understatement.

“This is like Harvey Weinstein doing a documentary on sexual assault,” lawyer and journalist Rogan O’Handley wrote. 

“HBO has hired Brian Stelter to do a documentary on Fake News. That's like hiring Bernie Madoff to teach accounting. Like hiring Michael Moore to host a fashion show. Not to mention [Stelter] is the dullest human ever on television,” radio host Mark Simone added.

“You’re kidding, right? [Brian Stelter] is the king of disinformation and fake news,” wrote Twitter user Pattie Taz.

It would make more sense for a documentary about fake news to use Brian Stelter and his home patch CNN as subjects, rather than accomplices. The channel is hot on the heels of reaching a massive settlement with Kentucky teen Nick Sandmann over coverage of his January 2019 run-in with Native American activist Nathan Phillips at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington DC. Sandmann was portrayed by CNN as the aggressor in the situation, thanks to edited video of him and other teens smiling at Phillips as he protested. Expanded video footage later showed Phillips initiating contact with the teen. 

CNN is also famous for devoting most of its time to President Donald Trump and just about every conspiracy linked to him, including that of ‘Russia collusion.’ CNN has even retracted a story about a supposed Russian investment fund that had ties to Trump officials. That 2017 report led to three journalists resigning their positions.

Stelter himself is something of a rabbit hole of odd and biased reporting. 

He ran a report in 2018 about how First Lady Melania Trump had “disappeared” and become “invisible.”

That ‘nothing story’ could have been clarified by a CSNBC journalist having actually seen the first lady a few days before – something Stelter ignored – or by the fact that she was recovering from surgery; but Stelter had a doomsday clock running anyway. 

He has also pushed the conspiracy theory that Fox News makes Trump’s decisions, which looks especially bad in light of the president’s recent Iran maneuvers, earning the CNN presenter more critics, like Fox News presenter Tucker Carlson.

On Jussie Smollett, the ‘Empire’ actor who falsely claimed to have been attacked by two Trump supporters who’d put him in a noose, Stelter refused to fully concede that the mounting evidence showed Smollett’s claim to be a hoax. 

“We may never really know what happened on that night,” he said last year about the hoax attack on the African-American actor. He also insisted that CNN put in “really careful” reporting on the subject, despite hosts like Ana Navarro and Don Lemon being some of the first to buy into Smollett’s flaky story.

Stelter is such a lazy and biased ‘reporter’ that he once questioned why Trump was at a UFC event, without looking up the basic background, that the president was one of the earliest supporters of the sports organization and an associate of UFC President Dana White.

At best, you can say Stelter is a pundit with a very heavy bias, but this still brings into question why he would be an authority on fake news. His stories are put through such a hard-left filter that it’s difficult to view him as someone who can even recognize fake news. 

And it’s not just Stelter’s left-wing bias that creates a problem. It would be just as ridiculous to produce a documentary that exposes fake news and then hire a conservative journalist who has pushed questionable stories in the name of an agenda to produce it.

A second documentary project coming from HBO includes the involvement of Ronan Farrow, an equally liberal individual but one who can at least stand on the back of solid reporting. It was Farrow who originally exposed the sexual misconduct allegations against disgraced producer Harvey Weinstein, and he hasn’t been shy about the pushback he got from some media outlets about his original story.

Farrow’s doc will investigate “threats, intimidation, and violence directed at journalists working to expose corruption and abuse by governments, corporations, and other powerful interests,” according to HBO.

That doc could end up being politically biased or weaponized, but at least it has the integrity and weight of a real journalist behind it. A Stelter doc on fake news sounds about as enticing and trustworthy as a documentary on humility from Donald Trump.