A Reliable Source

I've been interested in the news since the first day I can remember. My grandfather got me a computer in the early ’90s. So there I am at 10 years old building web pages about Nintendo games. It’s not journalism, but it’s something journalism adjacent where I’m gathering information, facts and publishing them on the internet.

I used to think that I never wanted to end up on TV, but a few weeks ago I was at home going through my mom’s old stuff, and I found this diorama from when I was 13 years old. It says, “Someday I want to be an anchorman.” I think that desire must have faded by the time I was at TU because I pivoted to the newspaper. But whether it was wanting to be an anchorman, apparently at some point, or wanting to be a newspaper editor, it was all there very, very early. 

Like so many people, TU was just the perfect fit for me in that moment. The truth is, I didn’t know a lot about the school until I was a senior in high school. I did not know a lot about the Baltimore area. Growing up, maybe because my dad worked in Washington, maybe because we had Washington TV channels at home and not Baltimore channels, I always thought of myself more as living in the Washington suburbs. But TU turned out to be the perfect distance from home, the perfect size and the perfect community. It was the perfect place for me.  

I remember feeling really lost my first semester living in the Glen Towers, trekking across campus to Stephens Hall. And then in the second semester in the spring, something just clicked. Friendships clicked into place. Activities clicked into place. And I started to find my place, like so many people do.

For me, a lot of that involved the Towerlight.  

Leading the paper was everything. I think I learned 20 years of journalism in two years leading the Towerlight. On one hand I think about confrontations with the university president, disagreements that were had. On the other hand, we had a really strong working relationship where administrators were available for interviews and were interested in helping students know how the system functions.

I loved traveling to Annapolis to cover legislative hearings about the university’s funding and writing about students advocating for themselves at the state level. I thought it was really interesting to understand how the University System of Maryland worked in relation to TU.  

We also published a sex column that created a lot of controversy. And I look back at that now with entirely positive memories, even though it was very negative at the time, because that’s what a college paper is for. It’s for students to experiment. It’s for students to try new ways of writing; create a little scandal as long as no one gets hurt.

If a student died off campus, if a tragedy happened off campus, I learned how to write about that in an empathetic way, how to make sure that news gets out.

At its best, the campus paper is an innovation lab where students are learning and experimenting. In our case, at that time, that meant doing more digitally, sending out email newsletters, trying to publish more often in more ways.

But print still really mattered.

I’ll never forget producing a special edition in the wake of the Virginia Tech shootings, which even though it was one state away, really shook students at TU. Publishing an overnight special edition about that was a real test for the staff but also a real opportunity to learn what it’s like in the real world, covering real news.

Being a part of a campus paper, even just being a reader of a campus publication, it connects you to your university. It helps you know more about your community.  

I feel like I would have been blind if I hadn’t had the Towerlight. I would have been so much less engaged.

Definitely. Professor Kimberly Lauffer (now at Keene State College) was an incredible resource, as a journalism professor and as an advocate for me on campus. Professor (Emeritus) Richard Vatz’s rhetoric class is one I'll never forget. He and I are still in touch from time to time. He’s even been critical of my work at CNN, and that’s kind of awesome. There’s a joy to that. 

Joining the Times was terrifying but thrilling. I was lucky to be choosing between a couple of different opportunities out of college. I had the opportunity to keep running my TV blog that I had started my freshman year and turned into a real business. I also had an opportunity at NBC News, but I chose the New York Times because I felt like I would be learning from the best of the best about print, about newspapers, at a time when print papers were still really vital. I felt like it would be grad school.

I thought it would be really hard to break into the print paper and get bylines in print. But it turns out the Times comes out every day. It's a bunch of blank pages until people fill it every day. The Times needed stories, and it was hungry for stories on my beat, television and media. So I was able to quickly carve out a space for myself and find a way to fit in.  

I had imposter syndrome when I joined the Times, but racking up all those bylines, breaking stories and landing scoops and being willing to write stories in the middle of the night, that’s what earned me credibility among my peers.  

I was covering television at a time of total reinvention. Netflix was just starting to make shows. YouTube was just starting to matter in Hollywood. So in retrospect, the stories I'm proudest of are those stories. I think my first front page story was about people watching YouTube videos at lunchtime.

Nowadays, we watch videos all day long on our phones—it feels as normal as breathing. But in 2008, the idea that you would spend your lunch break streaming something on your computer was really novel and interesting. I look back and I love the stories that previewed where the media world was going.  

One of the greatest lessons I learned at the Times was the value of corrections. When I think back to mistakes that I made, it’s mostly the typos, the spelling mistakes, the screwed-up names that nobody else remembers that I’ll never forget. Every time I made a mistake and I needed to run a correction, I would have a very uncomfortable but necessary conversation with my editor, Bruce Headlam. I remember dreading those conversations, but I think one of the main ways that journalists can win and regain trust is by admitting when they make mistakes. Running corrections when they’re necessary.

I think corrections are a good thing, not a bad thing, because it shows that we’re trying. I try to instill that now when I’m working with colleagues who are younger than me. Learning that on the Times’ media desk was invaluable. 

If joining the Times was going to grad school, the call from CNN was the offer for a Ph.D. It’s probably the second-biggest blessing of my life behind my wife and kids. At the time, I was writing about television. I had just finished my first book. I was not looking for a TV job. I figured I was way too bald to be on TV.

But when the anchor of “Reliable Sources” moved to Fox, CNN held on-air tryouts with a different host every week. So I hosted once, then I hosted again, then I hosted again. It was a no-brainer [to accept] when CNN offered the full-time job because it was an education in television news and in digital news. CNN taught me how to anchor, taught me how to host, taught me how to interview in public.

If you think about television news, a lot of it is interviewing in front of a million people, which is a very different skill than interviewing on the phone for an article.

CNN also showed me what a global 24/7 news organization can do. The Times was actively moving toward a digital subscription world, actively becoming a 24/7 global brand. But CNN already was.

The experience of reporting a story on CNN and having viewers in Hong Kong and Nairobi and London and Los Angeles all watch is extraordinary. There is a tremendous responsibility that comes with that power. To get to learn from the likes of Erin Burnett and Wolf Blitzer and Dana Bash was the blessing of a lifetime.

Anchoring “Reliable Sources” was the most rewarding job I have ever had. I don’t regret a second of it. But I was starting to repeat myself. I was starting to bore myself. I was starting to give the same speech on air more than I wanted to. I don’t regret a second of it, but I probably stayed in the job too long.

I never would have hopped off the treadmill willingly, but being pushed off was a gift in disguise for two reasons. One, because of when it happened.

The day I was let go, totally coincidentally, I was moving my family from New York City to a farm in New Jersey. I was changing everything about my life that week. And frankly, I had no idea how I was going to do it. My daughter was about to start kindergarten. My son was heading into preschool at a new school. And all of a sudden, because my CNN role was over, I was thrust into stay-at-home dad life.

I wish everyone could have a stay-at-home dad phase. If I could wave a public policy wand, that’s what I would do. Even though kids can be quite challenging.

Two, being on the outside after so many years inside CNN, was a really valuable perspective change. I had only ever worked for two institutions, the New York Times and CNN, two of the biggest news outlets in the world. To become a freelancer and write for lots of different places and go on lots of different TV channels helped me see the journalism business differently.

Taking a break from the daily news grind also helped me see the news environment differently. Being more of a casual news consumer and not caring so much about the minute-by-minute headlines was a mental health break. It was a really valuable change in perspective.

The news environment is really well-suited for news junkies. It is not as well-produced for casual news consumers, people who don’t really care about politics. And in that space, in that vacuum, there’s opportunity. We saw this in the recent election, where people who were really well informed about news went one way, and people who preferred podcasts and TikTok went another way.

In addition to the show on Sundays, I was doing the Reliable Sources newsletter, which I’m back at now, six nights a week and writing hundreds of stories a year on CNN.com. I feel like I almost never caught my breath. And once I caught my breath, I thought differently about the work I was doing.

I usually started my stories in the middle and not at the beginning, meaning I was writing about the latest developments with X or Y. And that makes total sense for that environment. But again, going back to that casual news consumer, maybe the news industry could do a better job starting stories at the beginning for people who need to be caught up.

Also, it was just fun to write for different magazines and try to write at different lengths. I almost felt like I was back at the Towerlight.

My kids kicked me out of the house. Just kidding.

I never would have believed that this call would come. But I started appearing as a guest on CNN again, in part because of what I said earlier, the media beat crosses over with every other beat. It was really fun to be back on as a guest, but I did not see it going any further than that. But when my friend Oliver Darcy, who was my successor running the Reliable Sources newsletter, decided to launch his own independent news outlet, CNN called and asked if I would think about returning.

I was on the beach in Ocean City, Maryland, when the call came in. And I immediately knew that it was the right thing to do. I never fully left CNN, meaning I still loved the place as a viewer. I still texted with lots of the anchors and reporters. I still sent ideas and tips to the producers. The news junkie part of my brain never fully turned off.

I was making a good living as a freelancer and really loved my work–life balance. So I wasn’t looking for a new job, so to speak. But to get back to work with old friends was a no-brainer. One of the great gifts about the call from CNN was that it was about a new job. Instead of anchoring, instead of being a correspondent and producing packages, I'm an analyst now. And I'm writing the newsletter again, but in the morning, not at night. So I’ve really reshaped the job.

I picture my CNN colleagues. I picture rivals of other networks. And I picture my mother-in-law as the audience. Both insiders and outsiders. I want to tell them all the most interesting things that have happened in the media world in the last 24 hours. And I want to tell them what’s about to happen.

I like to think of myself as sitting on a fence with one leg on the inside and one leg on the outside. And from that spot, I can tell people on the outside what’s going on in the inside.

Covering the media at a big media outlet is weird. There have been moments where I’ve had to interview people that CNN just fired. There have been moments where I’ve had to announce the death of beloved colleagues. Those are hard, but I think they’re critical.

One thing I learned about television is that viewers feel a deeply powerful connection to the faces and names on screen. People watch people is the three-word way to say it. People feel they know you when you’re a television correspondent or anchor. And so what we do is newsworthy. And how we do it is newsworthy. Changing consumption patterns, changing business models, changing norms affect everyone.

The power of Facebook or Instagram, the power of X or TikTok affects everybody. So the media beat crosses paths with basically every other beat. It’s a part of every story now. The way people get information and sometimes get misinformed is a part of every story.

It always comes back to transparency—meaning disclose, disclose, disclose. Tell viewers what you know and what you don’t know. And who you know.

I have lost friendships on this beat, but it’s with people at other networks, specifically Fox News.

Over the 20 years I have covered TV news, Fox has changed a lot. It was always small C conservative, but now it’s much more capital M MAGA. The more that I reported on Fox, the harder it became to stay in touch with Sean Hannity, for example. When I was at TU, Hannity and I were email buddies. We stayed in touch for years, but the Trump era ended that relationship.

You’ve got to look around on your beat, decide what is the most important story and try to own it. That’s true if you’re covering medicine, that’s true if you’re covering the Ravens. You want to own your beat. And for me, in the past 10 years, the biggest story has been right-wing media and how it’s reshaped our country.

It’s getting harder and harder for the average American to know what is true. That’s the downstream effect of years of attacks on the media, years of fake news, smears and years of efforts to build up an alternative media that is often not reality based.

There are moments in time where almost everybody sees clearly. The first couple of months of the terrible pandemic in 2020, the first couple of weeks after the Jan. 6 insurrection, there are moments where there’s relative unity with Americans seeking reliable sources and rejecting disinformation artists.

But for a bunch of reasons, people also tend to snap back. People also tend to seek out voices and outlets that tell them what they want to hear. And right now, we’re very much in one of those periods.

Most people want to know what is going on in the world around them. Most people want to know what is real and what is not. Most people don’t want to be hoodwinked. They don’t want to be misled by bad bit actors.

I think most people are inherently good. And they want a news ecosystem that helps them, informs them and enriches their lives, not some hyper-partisan shouting match that misleads and divides.

I know that we have a lot of that stuff out there now, but when something scary happens in the world around us or something wonderful happens in the world around us, people want to go to real, reliable sources to see that news.

I am an optimist at heart, and I am a product of the internet. I was able to go through side doors, not front doors, and create opportunities for myself. So I’m inherently pro-internet, but I struggle with the question because the damage done by these so-called social networks is so profound. But it’s a little bit like traffic. Everyone complains about traffic, but we are the traffic.

I think there’s a corollary about our information environment. It is polluted, yes, but some of us are the pollution. And there’s a supply and demand element to this where it seems a lot of people want to be misled or flirt with dangerous and nonsensical ideas.

I think there’s a corollary about our information environment. It is polluted, yes, but some of us are the pollution. [But] in an increasingly lonely world, [social media does] have the ability to connect us and bring us closer.

Brian Stelter

It’s not always as obvious, but so many untold hundreds of millions of people have benefited from these tools in different ways. Look, I met my wife on Twitter. I don’t recognize that version of Twitter anymore. I’m really disappointed by what X has become. But I still have love for the platform.

In an increasingly lonely world, these sites do have the ability to connect us and bring us closer. They often fail, right? And people can use them for all sorts of malicious and disgusting purposes. But I want to believe that all of us every day can make these platforms a little bit better or a little bit worse. That’s why I haven’t quit X, for example. A lot of journalists have left X because they think it’s a source of disinformation and discontent. I stay on these platforms in part because I want to share real news and real information.

I’m almost all the way past it. Journalists should welcome criticism, and I certainly do. I’ve learned a lot from my critics over the years, from something as simple as viewers writing about my neckties. I think we should be open to criticism, but when it devolves into threats and lies, that’s another matter entirely. But criticism can be really beneficial.

In 2020, a man started to threaten me and my brothers and mom in Maryland. And I dismissed it at the time as being just more of the noise out there on the internet. The man went on to stalk others and threaten other public figures and was eventually arrested and prosecuted. And in retrospect, I wished I had taken the threats more seriously on the first day.

If I’m a target, it’s because what I do matters, at least a little bit.

Brian Stelter

So there’s that tension between tuning it out versus taking it seriously. In this particular case, the Justice Department prosecuted the individual. I testified at one of the hearings. And I was really grateful that the government followed through and sent a message that when criticism shifts into harassment and stalking, it won’t be tolerated.

When I was out at CNN in 2022, there was a made-up story claiming I had been arrested by military police for some unspeakable crime. I was grateful that fact checkers funded by Meta followed up and confirmed it was a lie.

Someone even called the Pentagon to make sure I wasn’t in custody. That’s an example of fact-checking actually working. The lie about me ranked lower than the truth on Google. That’s a selfish example of why fact-checking is vital.

Unfortunately, we’re living in a moment where there’s a swing away from that, where Meta is no longer funding that faculty. Day by day, it feels like we live in an environment where you’re on your own. Tech platforms are not going to help you sort fact and fiction. But thankfully, big news outlets like CNN still will.

If I’m a target, it’s because what I do matters, at least a little bit.