Mark Halperin: Brian Stelter Protecting Jake Tapper Is ‘Nothing Short of Journalistic Corruption’

HALPERIN: “And then you’ve got, at CNN, this guy Brian Stelter, who’s their media Reporter, who’s an ally of Jake Tapper, to protect Tapper’s image, to enhance Tapper’s image. He’s got a media news letter. He’s supposed to cover the media. Guy doesn’t write about the biggest failure in the history of American media. Instead, he writes about how great Tapper’s book is. And today, in his newsletter, the guy — guy’s a fan of irony. He writes about how so — it was so important for Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson to have the truth in their book, the full truth, that they hired the head of the New Yorker’s fact-checking department to fact-check their book. Okay? Again, the job of a media Reporter, I would think, is not to protect and promote his colleague. And this is no — this is no innocent here, Brian Stelter. In addition to promoting and protecting Jake Tapper, Brian Stelter has been one of the — has been, over the course of the entire Biden presidency, one of the biggest critics of those on the right and those few people like me in the independent media who have tried to hold — who tried to hold Joe Biden accountable. He’s accused us of being propagandists, of celebrating cheap fakes and deep fakes. I don’t understand someone whose job it is to hold the media accountable to not hold not just his own network, but every news organization in the country, who, now it’s clear, participated in a cover-up. Some because of threats, some because of a desire to help Joe Biden win. Massive cover-up. And instead of pointing out the flaws in the book, he writes favorable — he cites the favorable reviews, the book, his gun from news organizations like The Washington Post and The New York Times, who participated in the cover-up and whose failure was manifest. He writes — he cites the favorable reviews and then the Twitter account of the book tweets out Brian Stelter’s citations. It’s just — it’s nothing short of journalism — journalistic corruption, and it’s missing the moment. The moment now for the Democratic Party is to acknowledge that, of course, we all saw with our own eyes, not in private meetings on C-SPAN, the public manifestations of Joe Biden’s decline. We all watched as the media, not the conservative media, but what I call the dominant media, simply pretended wasn’t happening, attacked those who pointed it out, and now everybody in the media say, ‘Well, we don’t acknowledge our own failure. We will just say Joe Biden shouldn’t have run, and people like Chuck Schumer should have called him out.’ It’s a big failure. And it’s missing the moment, okay? It’s missing the moment. We’ll keep watching. Book comes out next week.”