For the last NewsBusters Podcast of 2020, Executive Editor Tim Graham discusses the hour-long reliving of Trump Trauma on CNN’s Reliable Sources on Sunday. The biggest headline out of it was CNN host Jake Tapper proclaiming he just won’t lower himself to interviewing lyingTrump aides like Kayleigh McEnany.
At least Tapper admitted what Brian Stelter likes to deny — that CNN loves dishing out opinionated monologues. Tapper said ‘We felt in many ways the need to do more aggressive fact-checking. The monologues, the — well, whatever you call them. On Sunday, we call homilies. Well, on Sunday, we call them homilies, and during the week we call them Murrows, but that’s just, you know, nickname for what we call them.”
The Murrows! Just like Keith Olbermann, Jake Tapper likes to imagine himself doing some pompous documentary like Edward R. Murrow in Harvest of Shame. Bow to the worldly wisdom of crusading journalists, one and all.
In the second segment, Tim reviews the weirdness of the recent self-congratulatory media tour of Matthew Sheffield, a co-founder of NewsBusters who became a writer for Salon. After a Twitter thread trashing the conservative media on November 6, he drew praise from leftists like Keith Olbermann. Sheffield bragged to The New York Times “I basically built the infrastructure for a lot of conservative online people and personally taught a lot of them what they know.”
In two nationally syndicated NPR talk-show interviews and a Yahoo! podcast, Sheffield also uncorked a suspicious tale of attracting a major publisher in 2012 for an opus on how conservatives need to accept secular people into their circle. In his telling some nebulous “devout traditionalist Christians” (at NewsBusters?) tried to get him fired after he allegedly showed them pieces of his manuscript.
By the time he appeared on the Yahoo podcast “The Long Game,” Sheffield was claiming his alleged major publisher said “they thought it was the best conservative book they had seen in decades.” But the book was never published. What happened to it? His interviewers never pressed him, never asked him which “cancel-culture” conservatives had tried to get him canned.
Please enjoy below or wherever you experience your podcasts.