The Washington Examiner’s Susan Ferrechio slammed Brian Stelter and CNN for their lack of coverage of the Joe and Hunter Biden bombshell story on Wednesday as well as their overall double standard and lack of journalistic ethics.
“The bottom line is this deserves scrutiny by all media outlets, and if they pick and choose this and decide it’s not worth their time, I think that’s showing real bias,” Ferrechio said of the Biden email story, which the New York Post broke last week.
Both Stelter and Ferrechio were on a panel hosted by Amol Rajan on the BBC to discuss the implications and censorship of the bombshell story about Hunter Biden using his father’s position as vice president to leverage foreign business deals.
While Stelter claimed Ferrechio’s concerns about media bias by not covering the story were just “grievance politics that comes from the right,” Ferrechio quickly shot back.
“This is not last year’s news,” she said. “It’s whether or not his son was coordinating to get him to talk to these Ukrainian oligarchs, and he was benefiting from it. This is really dirty.”
Stelter took another hit after claiming that “newsrooms in America are very careful about this stuff” and that many were still evaluating the story’s claims through “slow, cautious vetting.”
“I think the bottom line is we don’t know what is real and what is fake in these emails if there is anything real in them,” Stelter said.
“Yeah, but that didn’t stop anyone from reporting the Mueller and the dossier,” Ferrechio replied.
🥊CNN vs The Washington Examiner🥊 @brianstelter @susanferrechio and @sarafischer debate the ethics of the Hunter Biden laptop story with @amolrajan on BBC's The Media Show. Listen to the full show here >>> https://t.co/GYbawxqmPm pic.twitter.com/YYwjtRHUBO
— Richard Hooper (@HooperRJ) October 21, 2020
While Stelter suggested degradingly, “I understand that you have a lot of resentment about that” and “I agree with you should not be ignored,” Ferrechio was quick to call him out on his hypocrisy.
“Now we have ethics,” she said sarcastically.
“Don’t you dare,” Stelter replied, getting defensive. “Don’t you dare act like newsrooms didn’t have ethics in 2017 and 2018.”
“You can ‘don’t dare’ me all you want, Brian,” Ferrechio said. “I’ve been doing this for 30 years, so say whatever you want. It’s my view, and I have a right to say it.”
Ferrechio also added that she didn’t ignore the Russian hoax stories when they came up either.
“I didn’t discard the Mueller stuff. I was much more skeptical because I knew the sourcing, and I knew where it came from on Capitol Hill, where I have stood in the building for the past few decades,” she said. “I had a real reason to doubt that stuff, and I constantly did, and it turned out a lot of it was a bunch of bunk.”
According to Ferrechio, the same principle the media applied to Mueller should apply to the Biden family story.
“I think everybody deserves to look at the Mueller stuff, and everyone should look at this and give Biden the scrutiny,” she said, adding, “He’s not running for president of the Glee Club; he’s running for president of the United States, and this is serious.”
Stelter’s track record with acknowledging CNN’s reporting mistakes in the Russian hoax is bleak.
In late September, Stelter refused to acknowledge that there was no collusion found between Russia and President Trump in the Mueller investigation and blatantly ignored the fact that the Steele dossier was a setup on an interview on “The Hugh Hewitt Show,” even though his new book is all about Trump’s unproven “ties with Russia.”
