Brian Stelter - Chief Media Analyst
Brian Stelter
Chief Media Analyst
Latest
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An overhauled ‘60 Minutes’ sheds viewers in season premiereSep 15, 2026Paramount’s overhaul of “60 Minutes,” and all the outrage that followed, did not spur many new viewers to check out the season premiere. -
Trump said the GOP’s midterm convention outperformed the NFL. Ratings show otherwiseSep 15, 2026There were two big events on television last Wednesday night: President Donald Trump’s speech at the Republican Party’s midterm convention, and the NFL’s 2025-26 season kickoff game between the Seattle Seahawks and the New England Patriots. -
• Live UpdatesLive Updates The 2026 Emmys: ‘Widow’s Bay’ and star Matthew Rhys win big on a historic nightSep 15, 2026The 78th Primetime Emmy Awards are honoring the best of television. Follow along for updates on red carpet fashion, buzzy moments and the night’s big winners. -
Exclusive: Inside Hegseth’s push to showcase a dramatic Iran rescue on ‘60 Minutes’Sep 12, 2026Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and political appointees in his office pushed for the two crew members of an F-15 who were shot down over Iran in April to participate in Sunday’s highly-publicized “60 Minutes” report about the ensuing rescue operation, according to multiple sources familiar with the matter. -
James Talarico blasts Trump FCC’s ‘dangerous’ cancel culture over Kimmel interview ordealSep 11, 2026Talarico, the Texas Democratic Senate candidate, says the Trump administration is committing “the most dangerous form of cancel culture” by pressuring TV stations. -
9/11 footage is reaching new audiences — and fueling old conspiracy theoriesSep 10, 2026Even 25 years later, the planes keep crashing, and the towers keep falling. All across the web, people who are old enough to remember September 11, 2001, are rewatching the attacks and rereading about the aftermath, often via devices and platforms that didn’t exist 25 years ago. -
There’s an old-school newspaper war brewing in DC — and we all stand to benefitSep 9, 2026Most days there are only two kinds of news about newspapers: Bad and worse. But in Washington, DC, there’s something unexpected happening. -
Trump adviser accuses Fox News of muzzling MAGA after Maria Bartiromo ousterSep 9, 2026Fox News is “suppressing MAGA news” and enforcing a “shadow ban” of some of President Donald Trump’s surrogates, White House trade adviser Peter Navarro charged in an audacious op-ed on Tuesday. -
Maria Bartiromo’s exit reveals the limits of Fox’s loyalty to TrumpSep 4, 2026President Donald Trump and Fox News have a mostly mutually beneficial relationship. But every so often, their interests diverge, and Maria Bartiromo is a prime example. -
Fox News abruptly ousts Maria Bartiromo, a longtime Trump allySep 4, 2026Fox News has parted ways with longtime anchor Maria Bartiromo, one of President Donald Trump’s closest allies at the network. -
Who is Rob Bonta? The AG at the heart of some of the biggest legal battles in businessSep 1, 2026California’s attorney general is angling for broader changes to the social media industry after a massive settlement with Meta. -
Trump calls for NBC’s Kristen Welker to face ‘rebuke or punishment’ from the FCCAug 30, 2026Treating the Federal Communications Commission like his own personal enforcer, President Donald Trump said on social media Sunday that NBC’s Kristen Welker would be “reported to the FCC for rebuke or punishment” over a TV segment he didn’t like. -
ABC’s ‘The View’ invites Karoline Leavitt to appear as a guestAug 27, 2026Outgoing White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt has been invited to visit ABC’s “The View” as a guest. -
CNN signal interrupted by Warner Bros. Discovery technical issueAug 24, 2026A technical issue across Warner Bros. Discovery’s channels disrupted CNN, HBO and other channels during the noon hour on the East Coast on Monday. -
California AG calls off Paramount settlement talks, accuses company of ‘playing games’Aug 24, 2026California Attorney General Rob Bonta has canceled a meeting that was scheduled for Monday over Paramount’s planned $110 billion takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery, CNN’s parent company. -
Paramount and state AGs will head to negotiating table in WBD merger fightAug 22, 2026Representatives for Paramount and the parties suing to block its takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) are set to meet next week for talks that could lead to a settlement.
About
Brian Stelter is the chief media analyst for CNN Worldwide and the lead author of the Reliable Sources newsletter. He covers the wide world of media, from free speech battles to business shakeups and tech transformations.
He was previously a reporter at The New York Times; anchor of Reliable Sources on CNN; and host of the weekly podcast Inside the Hive for Vanity Fair.
He is the author of three books, most recently “Network of Lies,” which examined Dominion’s blockbuster defamation case against Fox News. He has also written for The Atlantic, TIME, WIRED, Esquire, and numerous other magazines.
Stelter began his career in 2004 by creating the TVNewser blog while he was a freshman at Towson University. He sold it to Mediabistro six months later, but continued to run the blog during the next three years until he graduated with a bachelor’s degree in Mass Communications with a concentration in Journalism.
Upon graduation in 2007, he joined The Times as a media reporter and helmed the Media Decoder blog. While there, he appeared in the 2011 documentary “Page One.”
In 2013 Stelter published The New York Times best-seller “Top of the Morning: Inside the Cutthroat World of Morning TV,” about the competitive world of morning news shows. He is a producer on the Apple TV series “The Morning Show,” which is inspired by the book.
In 2020 he published “HOAX: Donald Trump, Fox News, and the Dangerous Distortion of Truth” and executive produced the HBO documentary “After Truth: Disinformation and the Cost of Fake News.”
Stelter has been a Walter Shorenstein Media and Democracy Fellow at Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy; a fellow at Georgetown University’s Institute of Politics and Public Service; and an adjunct professor at New York University.
He is a recipient of the Walter Cronkite Award for Excellence in Television Political Journalism and a two-time recipient of the Bart Richards Award for Media Criticism.
