News/Commentary

Professionalism of CNN’s Brian Stelter, Brian Lowry questioned after ‘truly amazing face-plant’

June 20, 2022 | | Print Article

CNN media critic Brian Lowry, who focuses largely on entertainment, took issue with New York Times columnist Ross Douthat’s critique of two popular films while managing to show how little he actually knows about the industries he covers.

Fittingly, he would get a ready assist from CNN chief media correspondent Brian Stelter.

Douthat penned a column titled, “What ‘Top Gun: Maverick’ and ‘The Northman’ Mean for the Movies,” suggesting that the films may just save the movie industry and Lowry responded in a tweet to blather: “Once again suggesting film critics should promise not to write about politics if NYTimes oped columnists will promise not to do … whatever this is.”

Stelter would give his colleague a boost by including a snippet of his analysis in his daily newsletter, in which Lowry says “news-based columnists choose to dapple in politics, a beat where (much like sports) everyone presumes that they are an expert..”

The only problem being that Douthat IS a film critic and has been for some time, as social media was quick to remind the CNN boobs.

Then again, what Douthat had to say about the films is very likely the real fly in the ointment for Lowry, as seen here:

This is not to rule out a more secular and political interpretation of the story, where “Top Gun: Maverick” is about American power poised among nostalgia, decline and possible rebirth. Indeed, to the extent that America is a formerly Christian society uncertain about its own religious future, the two interpretations complement each other. And to the extent that a kind of pagan revival offers one potential post-Christian future for American society, the moral-theological contrast between “Top Gun” and “The Northman” makes their shared aesthetic success that much more striking.

But now I’ve weighed them down with too much baggage, when it should be enough to say that both work terrifically well, both surprise and entertain — and from such simple goods and basic achievements, the movies as we knew them might yet be born again.

 

New York Post columnist Kyle Smith, a critic-at-large at National Review and a film critic in his own right, posted a scathing indictment of Lowry and his “amazing face-plant,” sharing Stelter’s newsletter snippet as well:

Smith proceeded to unload on Lowry for being “completely unacquainted with the basic facts of people he writes about” and on both Lowry and Stelter for their “total lack of professionalism”

Ouch.

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Tom Tillison
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