CNN’s Brian Stelter chided Washington Examiner Chief Congressional Correspondent Susan Ferrechio for calling out the mainstream media’s “ethics” when it came to reporting on supposed Trump/Russia collusion conspiracies, which have been largely discredited.
To Ferrechio’s point, the sudden onset of supposed “media ethics” comes in time to protect Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden from a potentially damaging story concerning his son Hunter Biden and the alleged selling of political access.
On the panel, Stelter dismissed the potential bombshell as old news and railed against Big Tech for not censoring conservatives even more. (The New York Post has been suspended on Twitter for days now after releasing the Biden story.)
The reason conservatives are seeing their news and voices censored by Big Tech, rationalized Stelter, is because of “asymmetric nastiness,” meaning Team Biden is running a clean campaign without lies, and the Trump campaign is misinforming the public.
Conservatives are being censored more, he said, because there is “more (bulls***) being spread by the Right. It’s sad, hopefully it’ll stop, but right now it’s true.”
Ferrechio, however, would not allow Stelter to skate.
“This is not last year’s news,” she told the CNN host of the Biden story. “It’s whether or not his son was coordinating to get him to talk to these Ukrainian oligarchs, and he was benefiting from it. It’s really dirty, and it needs to be looked at.”
Stelter claimed “newsrooms in America are very careful about this stuff” and work to slowly and cautiously vet the news. “I think bottom line is we don’t know what is real and what is fake in these emails, if there is anything real in them,” Stelter said.
“Yeah, but that didn’t stop [anyone] from reporting the Mueller and the dossier and all that stuff,” Ferrechio shot back.
“I know you’re bitter. I understand that you have a lot of resentment about that,” Stelter dismissed Ferrechio.
“Now we have ethics,” Ferrechio mocked.
“Don’t you dare,” an angry Stelter scolded the reporter. “Don’t you dare act like newsrooms didn’t have ethics in 2017 and 2018.”
“You can ‘don’t dare’ me all you want, Brian,” Ferrechio responded. “I’ve been doing this for 30 years, so say whatever you want. It’s my view, and I have a right to say it.”
“I didn’t discard the Mueller stuff,” she later added. “I was much more skeptical because I knew the sourcing, and I knew where it came from on Capitol Hill, where I have stood in the building for the past few decades,” she said. “I had real reason to doubt that stuff, and I constantly did, and it turned out a lot of it was a bunch of bunk.”
“I think everybody deserved to look at the Mueller stuff, and everyone should look at this and give Biden the scrutiny,” Ferrechio said. ” … He’s not running for president of the Glee Club; he’s running for President of the United States, and this is serious.”
LISTEN:
.@susanferrechio destroys Stelter in this interview. When she challenged the media on ethics, Stelter fumed, “Don’t you dare” twice.
“You can don’t dare me all you want, Brian. I’ve been doing this for 30 years, so say whatever you want. It’s my view.”pic.twitter.com/vQOpi2nbJY
— Cameron Cawthorne (@Cam_Cawthorne) October 21, 2020
The full exchange can be accessed here.
Partial transcript via The Federalist.