With the days running into one another, each a carbon copy of the one before, many Americans sheltering in place are beginning to feel stress over what amounts to a self-imposed house arrest. As is true of life’s more familiar stressors, people are handling the quarantine in different ways. The apparent diary entry of one individual having a particularly bad time of it forms the title of this post. (RELATED: The stress pandemic)
So who is this tortured soul that weeps for paradise lost? None other than CNN “journalist” Brian Stelter.
On Saturday, the host of the comically named “Reliable Sources,” took to Twitter to unburden himself:
Will this presidential election be the most important in American history?
I crawled in bed and cried for our pre-pandemic lives. Tears that had been waiting a month to escape.
I wanted to share because it feels freeing to do so. Now is not a time for faux-invincibility. Journos are living this, hating this, like everyone else. https://t.co/dIDujZZvQZ
— Brian Stelter (@brianstelter) April 18, 2020
Stelter’s ruminations touched a nerve with another equally fair-minded journalist — far-left writer and activist Amy Skiskind, who mused on her own season in hell:
I hit that wall in the beginning of last week, and cried every night watching NBC Nightly News, seeing stories of Americans who had died and their families mourning.
Please do you part to stop your network from broadcasting his propaganda. It is helping him get away with this!
— Amy Siskind 🏳️🌈 (@Amy_Siskind) April 18, 2020
The masculine personal pronouns in the last sentence of Siskind’s tweet refer back to the president, who Siskind and Stelter both see as the source of the “political rhetoric that bears no resemblance to reality.”
But if Stelter and Siskind are earnest about changing the tenor of the discourse on the shutdown and the battle to defeat the coronavirus, maybe they should do some more soul searching. This past Tuesday, their peers in the Washington press corps achieved a new level of hostility toward the administration during the daily coronavirus task force briefing. CBS reporter Paula Reid set the tone by asking Dr. Anthony Fauci whether his support for the president’s comments on the coronavirus was “voluntary” or coerced.
Stelter’s own network hammered the president both live and via chyrons with provocative messages like “Trump refuses to acknowledge any mistakes” and “Angry Trump turns briefing into propaganda session.”
