Nolte: CNN Insiders Want Brian Stelter Fired over Zucker-Gollust Cover-Up

The calls to fire CNN Misinformation Maven Brian Stelter are coming from inside the house.

“The network needs to step up and fire Brian Stelter,” a CNN insider told the Daily Mail. “He is allegedly our top media reporter – yet he failed to report on the scoop that everyone in the office knew. And if he wants to say he didn’t know, he is truly terrible at his job.”

A cable news veteran, who wishes not to be named, spoke of the close relationship between Stelter and Zucker.

‘Brian Stelter should be calling his agent to start looking for another job,’ they said. ‘He’s been Jeff Zucker’s water boy for years and no one believes he didn’t know about all of this.’

[…]

‘He’s been sitting on his moral high horse doing Jeff’s bidding and ripping Fox and every other media outlet that Jeff tells him to while his ratings crash and burn. Where was he on the biggest story at his own network after chastising everyone else?’

I’m not sure how Stelter was supposed to report out his own boss having an inappropriate relationship with a subordinate. That would be a blatant act of insubordination, a violation of trust. So my issue with Stelter is not so much his silence but his willingness to service the cover-up of the affair with blatant misinformation.

We now know that the day before Radar Online broke the story of Zucker’s affair with Allison Gollust (who holds the number two spot at CNN), Stelter published a non sequitur in his newsletter attacking Radar as “nutty” and not “swayed by reality.” Here’s the full story on that.

That timing is not a coincidence.

So it’s one thing to ignore or remain silent regarding something internal. It’s quite another to service something so obviously sleazy and unethical.

As CNN’s media reporter, Stelter should have been sounding the alarm internally about how the Zucker-Gollust affair was undermining the newsroom’s integrity. If that effort went nowhere, he should have resigned on principle.

It is just a fact that the Zucker-Gollust affair poisoned everything and everyone at CNN. And while this was happening, and while Stelter knew it was happening, he not only eagerly swallowed the poison, he got on his self-righteous high-horse lecturing others about capital “J” journalism.

What you have to know is this… That before she joined Zucker at CNN in 2013 (just after Zucker took over), Gollust served as then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s (D-NY) communications director. From there, the dots are easy to connect. Gollust goes to work for CNN, and what happens? CNN turns itself over to advancing Andrew Cuomo’s political career. Andrew’s little corrupt brother Chris is given a morning anchor job, and after he fails there, he’s still promoted to primetime. Worse still, between 2019 and 2020, on behalf of the Jeff Zucker-Allison Gollust-Andrew Cuomo three-way, the entire network, everyone who works there, spent a whole year positioning Andrew to become president.

Everyone covered up Andrew’s scandals and sought to delegitimize his critics. Andrew was allowed to join his brother’s primetime show to burnish his image. CNN spent months and countless hours presenting Andrew to the world as America’s Governor and president-in-waiting.

If Brian Stelter had even an ounce of integrity, he would have either put a stop to this or resigned. Instead, he participated in the three-way — as did Jake Tapper, Wolf Blitzer, Anderson Cooper, Alisyn Camerota, and the rest.

They all knew about the three-way, and they all serviced it by aiding and abetting Andrew Cuomo.

So the only thing that separates Stelter from his sleazy, ethically compromised CNN colleagues is that he’s a wafer-thin-mint away from exploding.

Other than that, the whole network is shit, is a cancer on everything journalism is supposed to stand for.

Follow John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC. Follow his Facebook Page here.