CNN media correspondent Brian Stelter expressed disappointment in President Donald Trump this morning on Twitter after the president called out the MSM over its recent conspiracy-laden coverage of Melania Trump.
Following kidney surgery on May 14, the first lady took some time off to recuperate and thus didn’t have any public appearances on her schedule until this week. Although she was spotted by reporters at the White House during that period, the media remained obsessed about her whereabouts and encouraged the spread of outrageous conspiracy theories by playing up her absence from the public eye.
Not that this will deter the conspiracy theorists, but I saw the First Lady walking with her aides in the West Wing yesterday afternoon. https://t.co/N9xadq7P0d
— Eamon Javers (@EamonJavers) May 30, 2018
On Monday evening the first lady hosted some Gold Star families at an event at the White House.
An indignant Trump called the media’s treatment of Melania “unfair and vicious” in a couple of tweets Wednesday morning:
The Fake News Media has been so unfair, and vicious, to my wife and our great First Lady, Melania. During her recovery from surgery they reported everything from near death, to facelift, to left the W.H. (and me) for N.Y. or Virginia, to abuse. All Fake, she is doing really well!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 6, 2018
…Four reporters spotted Melania in the White House last week walking merrily along to a meeting. They never reported the sighting because it would hurt the sick narrative that she was living in a different part of the world, was really ill, or whatever. Fake News is really bad!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 6, 2018
Stelter (aka “Tater”) defensively countered that the president had conflated “random Twitter commenters” with “the media,” which he claimed was “a common tactic of bad faith critics,” clearly insinuating that President Trump was a “bad faith critic.”
Trump is conflating random Twitter commenters with "the media" here. A common tactic of bad faith critics. But disappointing to see POTUS do it. pic.twitter.com/7tWObMmUdD
— Brian Stelter (@brianstelter) June 6, 2018
But who is the “bad faith critic” here? And how “random” were the conspiracy comments on Twitter?
For the past couple of weeks, Twitter has been rife with conspiracy comments from blue checkmarks speculating about Melania’s “disappearance.” Twitchy did a good job rounding up some of the best hot takes.
Stelter himself flogged the issue on CNN’s Reliable Sources over the weekend, opening a segment by saying, “The last time we caught a glimpse of her was on May 10th, 24 days, more than three weeks [ago]. There’s been a lot of questions about her surgery, her time at Walter Reed, and now her invisibility.”
“There have been questions” was Stelter’s passive-aggressive way of saying, “we want to make this an issue.”
But as had already been established, there was no issue. Melania had not vanished off the face of the earth. She had been quietly recuperating at the White House the whole time.
But Stelter, clearly wanting to push the nothingburger as a legitimate news story, asked a guest, “How long does she have to be out of sight to make this a legitimate media story?”
Stelter went on to ask yet another guest, Chicago Sun-Times columnist Lynn Sweet: “Is this a big story? Is it getting bigger the more days that she’s out of sight?”
The only ones who tried to make the non-story into a “big story” were fake news hacks like CNN’s Brian Stelter — which is why he is getting hammered on Twitter today.
Fox News’ Tucker Carlson remarked on his show last night that the media’s obsession with Melania Trump shows how much they hate her.
“Melania Trump has done absolutely nothing wrong to you or anyone you know or anyone you will ever meet. She married Donald Trump. That is her only sin in the eyes of the press corps and yet it’s enough to disqualify her even from the most basic consideration of decency,” Carlson said.
If CNN reporters know anything, Tucker said, it’s that “Republican first ladies lie a lot and are evil and for the sake of civilization, must be destroyed.” That’s why CNN didn’t buy the White House’s cover story about Melania’s health, Tucker explained.
So CNN assigned its “most dogged journalist to crack the case — the squeaky but persistent Brian Stelter.”
“Stelter understood almost immediately that the ‘whole kidney operation story’ was just a cover for something darker and more sinister. Likely another international scandal emanating from that dark lord Vladimir Putin himself,” the Fox host quipped.
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