Michael Luciano at Mediaite promoted Brian Stelter’s interview with Dan Abrams on NewsNation Tuesday evening. Stelter claimed he didn’t know why he was fired (well, when other red-hot Trump haters stayed).
“They kind of pushed you out,” Abrams said.
“I’ve embraced the f-word,’ Dan,” Stelter replied. “Fired!”
“Why do you think you got fired?” Abrams asked.
“I don’t know,” came the reply.
“Really?” the host asked. “You really don’t know.”
“I really, truly don’t know,” Stelter insisted. “I know I had a popular show by CNN standards and I know that it was pretty cheap to produce. But I also know every show gets canceled eventually.”
Abrams wondered: “Do you think you represented the kind of opinion – particularly from the left – that Chris Licht wanted to distance himself from? Because I think that’s why he ended up letting you go.”
“Well, I’m just gonna let you say it then,” he replied. “I think we were doing fantastic journalism at CNN for the nine years that I was there. And I also think Fox News really enjoyed making me a target and using horrible names about me and all that sort of stuff that happens in the cable news wars.”
He told Abrams: “I appreciate that shows like yours rise above that. But Fox, they often take the low road. They enjoyed making into a target and I think they enjoyed seeing me leave CNN.”
It’s a little funny for Stelter to talk about “taking the low road” when he’s most infamous for bringing on a guy claiming Trump would kill more people that Stalin, Hitler, and Mao combined. That’s a little lower than Greg Gutfeld mocking Stelter about his weight.
Stelter expressed support for his old team: “I think what CNN trying to do is what I just sat lower the temperature, lower the volume, and I’m rooting for them because we need to have a lot of news that works in this country.”
Speaking of bizarre claims that CNN has changed anything under Chris Licht, Mediaite’s Luciano recently claimed “ ”Licht has moved the network away from what CNN’s critics regarded as a liberal partisan slant and instead has emphasized straight news programming.”