Only nine days ago, Daily Wire Editor-in-Chief Ben Shapiro appeared on CNN’s “Reliable Sources” with host Brian Stelter, and when asked which media outlet had displayed the most egregious bias on the issue of gun control, answered succinctly, “CNN.”
On Monday night, appearing on HLN’s “S.E. Cupp Unfiltered,” Stelter not only confirmed Shapiro’s perspective, but revealed that he himself showed egregious bias of his own on the issue by letting leftist anti-gun activist David Hogg make false claims on his show without challenging him.
As Newsbusters reports, Cupp was querying Stelter about the media’s deliberate bias in favor of teenage kids championing gun control while ignoring other students who don’t share the same view.
The exchange went like this:
Cupp: Brian, we as a business have been giving these kids a lot of coverage. All the networks have in some way or another. And as I was mentioning in the last segment with Connie Mack, gun policy is boring, right, so it doesn’t get a lot of TV coverage. It shouldn’t; it is boring; I understand that. But the policy’s the tough part. Do you think in showing these kids so often, as often as we all do, we’re doing actually them a disservice because the policy is actually what’s going to change this? The passion, I fear, will just sound like noise after a while and people will tune it out.
Stelter: A disservice is a strong word, but when I was interviewing David Hogg only ten days after the massacre, there were a few times I wanted to jump in and say let’s correct that fact.
Cupp: That’s so interesting. Let me stop you. Did you?
Stelter: And at one of the times I did and other times I did not. There’s always that balance, how many times you’re going to interrupt.
As Newsbusters notes, “The only time Stelter could recall correcting the raging anti-gunner was when he claimed NRA spokeswoman Dana Loesch was the CEO of the organization. … That interview was conducted with Hogg sitting next to disgraced CBS anchor Dan Rather, and he gave the young activist-reporter career advice.”
That part of the exchange went like this:
Cupp: Yes, it’s a very tricky thing because this is a victim on one hand who is entitled to his own emotional response. But at the same time as news people, when we hear something demonstrably untrue, you want to go in and say that that’s not right.
Stelter: When he called Dana Loesch the NRA CEO, I interrupted and corrected that but there are other times when— I think, all of us can agree, any of these students, any of these parents, we want everybody to be as well informed as we can about the contours of this debate. I think we have to recognize where David Hogg and Emma Gonzalez are coming from. There has been this increase in the lethality of mass shootings in recent years in this country. The so-called top ten list of horrors is very, very ugly and very recent.
So, I can see where these students are coming from, saying this is getting worse. It’s not just that there are 90 something people a day that die from guns, mostly from suicides. It’s that the mass shootings are getting worse. I do think they are trying to raise awareness of that.
Video below: