(C) Common Dreams
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In ‘Network of Lies,’ Brian Stelter Builds the Case Against Fox News [1]
['Dwight Garner', 'More About Dwight Garner']
Date: 2023-11-14
Stelter, a young fogy who once worked at The New York Times, has a wonkier disposition. He uses words like “shenanigans.” He wrote his book, he says, to help readers feel “empowered” to push back. He’s like a Canadian Mountie who has stumbled upon a gerbil-stomping ring. For Stelter, journalism might be a humble calling, but it is a patriotic and noble one. It burns him to see its ideals perverted.
Stelter barely mentions Wolff in his book except to say, in a line that seems lifted from a colonial-era newspaper, that his pen is “oft full of poison.” Wolff, being Wolff, puts Stelter in a headlock and gives him a noogie. He calls Stelter, who hosted a media show on CNN for nine years, that network’s designated “Fox besmircher.” Wolff writes that CNN fired Stelter in 2022 “at least in part because his sense of personal outrage seemed to trend into self-parody.”
I admire a lot of things about Wolff’s book; he knows more about the inner workings of the Murdoch family, and he has a silky sense of human motivation. And oddly, his might be the more influential of the two. This is because loyal followers of hosts like Sean Hannity — who kind of resembles Lou Costello, as Sigrid Nunez wrote in her novel “What Are You Going Through” — are more likely to read it than one by Stelter, a longtime Fox News punching bag.
Yet Stelter’s is the better book. He delivers a straightforward, grinding, momentum-building account, from an inside-Fox-News perspective, of the conspiracy to steal the 2020 presidential election, the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, the Dominion Voting Systems defamation lawsuit and Tucker Carlson’s defenestration. He does this so deftly that “Network of Lies” reads like one of Bob Woodward’s mightier books. Stelter makes especially good use of the years of private texts, emails, chats and memos that Fox News was forced to release to Dominion.
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[1] Url:
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/14/books/review/network-of-lies-brian-stelter.html#:~:text=Yet%20Stelter's%20is%20the%20better,lawsuit%20and%20Tucker%20Carlson's%20defenestration.
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