Brian Stelter Must Be Livid as Sales for His New Book Bomb in Brutal First Week
Former CNN talking head Brian Stelter has given us one more reason to hammer a nail in the coffin of the establishment media.
According to Mediaite, Stelter’s latest book sold an atrocious 3,807 copies in its first week, following its Nov. 14 publication.
An establishment shill who spent years posing as a media critic while hosting CNN’s “Reliable Sources,” Stelter wrote “Network of Lies: The Epic Saga of Fox News, Donald Trump, and the Battle for American Democracy.”
Notwithstanding that dramatic title, the reading public apparently anticipated nothing “epic” in Stelter’s book.
“Network of Lies” tanked despite support from Simon & Schuster, one of the nation’s top publishers.
The book also had no shortage of promotion from the author. In fact, Mediaite described Stelter as “nearly ubiquitous in the political media world” before and after the book’s publication.
Of course, Mediaite — a left-wing news outlet — gave Stelter’s bomb as positive a spin as possible, noting, for instance, “his seamless return to the CNN airwaves and how well-received he was, not just at his former employer, but also on MSNBC, where he has frequently appeared as a guest,” and touting the book’s “rave reviews” from The New York Times.
In other words, as long as he attacks Trump and conservatives, Stelter remains in the establishment media’s good graces.
As one might expect, some conservative outlets had less flattering things to say about the book’s sales performance. The Gateway Pundit, for instance, called it a “tremendous failure” and a “BIG FAT FLOP.”
Perhaps, though, we should not be too hasty to dismiss the book’s sales.
After all, according to the U.K. Daily Mail, a revised version of Stelter 2020 book “Hoax: Donald Trump, Fox News, and the Dangerous Distortion of Truth” — does Stelter write on any other subjects? — sold only 1,738 copies in its first week. By comparison, “Network of Lies” amounts to a bestseller.
On balance, though, we do seem to have a diminishing market for liars who write books about supposed lies.
Indeed, judging by sagging book sales and plummeting ratings, the establishment media can only lie for so long. Even their partisan viewers will eventually abandon them and seek less obvious falsehoods elsewhere.
Meanwhile, those who crave truth have found it in alternative media. Elon Musk’s social media platform X, for instance, has created the closest thing we have to a marketplace of ideas. Of course, we still find plenty of falsehoods on X, but we also find truths to counter them.
This is why, at the most recent Republican presidential debate, Vivek Ramaswamy received such applause from GOP voters when he rightly suggested that Musk, Tucker Carlson and Joe Rogan — three figures now associated with free speech and alternative media — should moderate a Republican debate in place of the usual establishment shills.
In other words, we know that establishment media figures like Stelter lie to us. And we know that they do so at the behest of other establishment liars at CNN and elsewhere. So we must move on from them — all of them.
Thus, we do not marvel at Stelter’s book flop so much as acknowledge it. In the same way, we acknowledge the establishment media as a force that once mattered but no longer does.
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