Brian Stelter on Journalists Who Make Up Stories: ‘I Can Count Them on One Hand’

In the immediate aftermath of President Donald Trump’s speech at CPAC, CNN went to a panel of analysts, led by their own senior media correspondent, Brian Stelter. In doing a postmortem on the speech, much of which was built around attacking the news media, Stelter paid specific attention to a couple specific moments: Trump saying that all stories citing anonymous sources are made up as well as his promise to “do something” about how he feels the media doesn’t represent the people.

With regards to the allegation of making up stories, Stelter said that “there’s no evidence of that. When we have anonymous sources, our bosses know who they are and there’s very careful research and vetting that goes on. Journalists do not make up stories and sources.” Stelter did make sure to note that there is the occasional outlier, though: “Once in a while, there are bad apples in a news organization, I can count them on one hand, and when that happens there are penalties, but journalists don’t make up sources,” he explained.

“He said journalists make up polls,” Stelter added “That is completely untrue. People work really hard using scientific methods to conduct these polls.”

As for Trump’s line about how “we’re going to do something about it,” Stelter said that “a lot of journalists got a chill up their spine hearing that sentence.” He asked if “that [is] just normal bluster from the president,” saying that “it could be, he’s just complaining.” But he added that “to say we’re going to do something about it, it’s curious, because so far all he’s really done is complained about the coverage. He hasn’t taken actions against news organizations.”