CNN media reporter Brian Stelter looked uncomfortable during a conference on disinformation when a college freshman grilled him over his network’s record in promoting false claims.
Christopher Phillips, a first-year student at the University of Chicago, confronted Stelter, who was invited to speak about the phenomenon of “fake news” at a seminar titled “Disinformation and the Erosion of Democracy.”
Phillips, who is a reporter for the libertarian-leaning newspaper the Chicago Thinker, took to the microphone and reminded Stelter of CNN’s reporting errors.
“They push the Russian collusion hoax, they push the Jussie Smollett hoax, they smear Justice [Brett] Kavanaugh as a rapist, and they also smeared Nick Sandmann as a white supremacist,” Phillips told Stelter.
“And yes, they dismissed the Hunter Biden laptop affair as pure Russian disinformation.”
He continued: “With mainstream corporate journalists becoming little more than apologists and cheerleaders for the [Biden] regime, is it time to finally declare that the canon of journalistic ethics is dead or no longer operative?”
Phillips then added: “All the mistakes of the mainstream media and CNN, in particular, seem to magically all go in one direction. Are we expected to believe that this is all just some sort of random coincidence or is there something else behind it?”
Video of the encounter went viral on social media.
Stelter appeared eager to dodge the question, saying: “It’s time for lunch.”
He then told Phillips that...
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