Bemused, there was probably something in Stelter’s contract with CNN that gave the network the right to terminate it, under what conditions, and how much, if anything, he’d be paid for early termination.

His podcast can probably be listened to online or on a smart phone.

The feeling is mutual, John McKee.

Firefox: I share your disappointment with regard to that exchange between Jim Acosta and Chad Wolf (couldn’t watch all the way to the end) but I learned long ago that perfection is not a reasonable expectation. Until very recently, he’d been one of my favourites. My guess is that he got “the memo” asking (an euphemism) him to tone it down. Seems that Brian Stelter had three years to go on his contract when he was let go without even a month’s notice (is that even legal in the USA?). His last show was one of his best and I intend to find a way to listen to his podcast.

While I regret CNN’s hard-right shift very deeply I feel it would be unjust to blame journalists and staff, even (particularly?) those who had become accustomed to telling it as it is. I have nothing good to say about the owners and the top management. This would be time for wealthy folks with a social conscience to step up and do what Ted Turner did back in the day.

I guess I’m going to have (finally) to learn how to do this thing called “streaming” in order to gain access to alternative news sources.

My cable provider recently added a channel called TRT world (Turkiye Radio and Television). Although the coverage of anything Turkish is clearly pro-Erdogan propaganda, their stories on other countries aren’t bad. A great feature is that guests aren’t expected to speak in sound bites; they are given the time to place their comments in context (beginning, middle and end). I admit that some guests (mostly rabid RWingers) abuse of this liberty to recite their lists of disconnected, fact-free talking points (which the hosts are wont to point out to my delight).

Nothing that spoiled boy-man does can shock me more than the fact that ANYONE with a functioning brain-stem can take him seriously, or even worse, give him a platform.

As an aside, I must express my total love of Bemused. Without her unique perspective and insight, the NewsHounds site would be so much the poorer. Long may she bless us with her wit and wisdom!

I am shocked at Stelter’s departure from CNN, to the point of considering dropping my cable account. I don’t see how it puts CNN in Fox’s league, scooter, but it does suggest that CNN is going back to the days when it turned the other cheek to Fox News’ direct attacks on the ‘mainstream media’. This self-handicapping doesn’t work among companies the way Jesus said it would work among individuals. As the Newshounds pack knows, degeneracy fostered by the right wing media sphere is in itself genuine news, arguably the biggest ongoing news story of this century, and CNN will be derelict to ignore it.

Bemused, I like Jim Acosta’s unflappability, but I think he acquitted himself rather disappointingly in an interview yesterday with Trump minion Chad Wolf. In my view Acosta should have better anticipated Wolf’s answers and been better prepared to debunk some of them. For example, Wolf said Trump “repeatedly” told marchers to be peaceful on Jan. 6 when in fact Trump at the rally mentioned “peace” only once, which, as the Jan 6 committee has revealed, was a word others had put into his mouth and which literally didn’t apply to those Trump knew were already threatening the Capitol.

CNN is FOX Lite, and they are no longer about truth or facts, only ratings & $$$. That’s all that matters. It’s the ’Murican Way – profit above all else.

Since the Jan6 insurrection, during which at least one of its teams of journalists was seriously threatened by armed rioters, CNN started becoming increasingly more critical of GOP madness (lies, off-the-wall statements, outright ignorance of just about anything from science to history and beyond) and, to a lesser extent, of Fox(not)News. CNN hosts and guests started calling out the lies and they were even (sometimes) allowed the time to provide context as an effective antidote for the misinformation broadcast on Fox. Some hosts started to challenge RW guests for lying, evading questions and ignorance. CNN had not yet (to my mind) developed the ability to counteract the lies and infotainment but they were definitely getting better. All that was needed was to counter lies with the facts placed in context.

I fear that all that will change with the new owners who seem rather more interested in $$$$ than journalism. I’d already sensed that something was up when Brianna Keilar (sp?) was shifted from prime time to early morning, That girl used to be a breath of fresh air, much like Kate Balduan who is no longer the witty, savvy pixie I’d come to adore in 2016. I’ve read somewhere that both may have wanted to spend more time with their families but that doesn’t help me deal with the loss of their company.

I fully expect to see other professional hosts like Jim Acosta to be shifted or disappear. That’s a real pity because CNN had been on its way to returning to the early days when it had earned a reputation for truth-telling, not being “centrist”, whatever that means. Truth is not a LW or RW thing, it’s facts and – in our day – those facts do seem to be more often used by the LW. A “centrist” CNN will be all about false equivalences. Pity.

Well, I wait with confidence to see Tucker dumped as well; Foxy stars have a short shelf life, even the most vicious ones.

I’m really, really sorry that Reliable Sources has been taken down, after 30 years of trying to understand what ticks in the profession of journalism. It’s one of the very few CNN programmes I made sure to watch every Sunday. Unlike Smerconish, who is often despairingly irrelevant, Stelter’s show alays dealt with what was happening at the moment. And he had guests who believed in the “ethics” of journalism.

By dumping a serious show that placed the media under a microscope, the new owners of CNN are telling me they are not particularly interested in promoting truth-seeking. What they really, really want to do is steal ratings/money away from others by taking away some of ther thunder. I saw one pundit say the new owners want CNN to be more “centrist”. That word allows me to fear that each and every reprehensible act by the RW will be compared to a similar but insignificant failing on the part of the LW.

It’s only a matter of time for any reference to Trump’s willful mishandling of official documents (classified or not) to be “balanced” by raising yet again the matter of Hillary’s emails (without mentioning that Colin Powell did the same) and never but never even mentioning that Secret Service wiped all the texts on official phones shortly after Jan6. Whatabout-ism will become the underlying principle of CNN reporting and I will return to calling them Fox-Lite as I did during the period running up to Trump’s election.