Now That’s Scary: Stephen King Tweets Tribute to Stelter

CLAY: Brian Stelter’s CNN career coming to a close on Sunday. Reliable Sources, which is certainly an oxymoron, will be no more. And I’m reading right now a story out there that CNN’s boss has warned CNN employees, more changes are coming and that people may not like or understand what is going to happen as they continue to fire and move on.

I don’t think we even mentioned it on the show, Jeffrey Toobin out as well. Of course Toobin memorably caught treating his body like an amusement park on the — I think it was the New Yorker, I believe — Zoom call.

BUCK: I believe it’s autoerotica is what you could describe it as.

CLAY: Yes. And so, anyway, he is gone. And now we have Brian Stelter gone. But we did not want Brian Stelter to ride off into the CNN sunset without us giving proper respect to his tenure at CNN. So, this is a — I think it’s like a 45-second medley.

BUCK: This is an homage. This is an homage ’cause Stelter himself on his way out the door.

CLAY: Enjoy.

CLAY: Oh, so sad.

BUCK: You know, I gotta tell you, Stephen King. Do you ever read any of his books?

CLAY: I did. You never read a Stephen King book?

BUCK: I’ve never read a Stephen King book in my life. Are any of them actually worth it? Or are they all about possessed toaster ovens that eat people?

CLAY: I remember — I was probably in seventh grade, and I read I think it was ‘Salem’s Lot, which, if I remember correctly, is about vampires.

BUCK: Pretty good?

CLAY: Terrified me.

BUCK: Really?

CLAY: I remember when Stephen King — I believe this is true — when he was writing Pet Sematary, he so scared himself that he wasn’t able to finish the book for a while, which is — I did respect that. I mean —

BUCK: I rented Pet Sematary from the video rental store when I was a kid without telling my parents.

CLAY: Not a good move.

BUCK: I got 10 minutes into it, I took it off. I couldn’t do it.

CLAY: Back in the day in those eighties movies, I remember watching Nightmare on Elm Street many times. Can I just say, why anybody ever lived on Elm Street, the same thing now with Stranger Things, like, why is anybody staying in Hawkins, Indiana, in the first place?

BUCK: Yeah. Real estate values probably plummeted after it came out.

CLAY: Yeah, right. I would think that maybe if you really cared about your family, you’d move out of Hawkins, Indiana, or not live on Elm Street. But so —

BUCK: Wait, wait, wait. I’m not done with this because Stephen King tweeted about Stelter, which is why, you know, we’re talking about. Scariest movie you’ve ever seen. The one that, at the time — forget about how you feel about it now. The scariest movie you have ever seen is…?

CLAY: The one that has impacted my life the most and continues to is Jaws.

BUCK: What? Scariest movie —

CLAY: I’m just saying. I’m saying in terms of impacting the largest number of people, no movie has been more impactful in film history than Jaws.

BUCK: Ah.

CLAY: Because every single person right now listening to us if you go out and you get past waist deep in the ocean, you are thinking to yourself, I’m gonna get killed by a shark. There’s no other movie you can point to like that. Now, in terms of just a scary movie that stuck with me for a long time, I’m gonna go probably I’m gonna go with The Conjuring. The Conjuring movies are so good.

BUCK: For me, it’s The Exorcist and I have a special connection to The Exorcist ’cause I lived on the street in Georgetown where the now famous Exorcist steps are. And I walked past that every single day from that scene at the very end but also that part of Georgetown right next to the university in particular they used it for some of the scenes so I thought The Exorcist was the scariest movie I’ve ever seen. More recently there’s a movie called The Witch which is about Salem witch trial era New England. Very eerie, well done, scary movie. And no slasher stuff or — the slasher stuff I just think is — I don’t need to see all the chocolate syrup on the screen all the time. Like, it’s just gross. You know, that stuff doesn’t —

CLAY: I get more wrapped up in the psychological. So, I watched a movie called The Mothman Prophecies, which no one may have ever seen. I think Richard Gere was in it. I was terrified by that. But the last time that I was scared to sleep, I watched Paranormal Activity, the original. The original Paranormal Activity.

BUCK: One of the most successful movies dollars in, dollars out, of all time.

CLAY: My family was gone, and my wife, I think, had the kids at their mom’s house or something like that for a weekend trip and I was still working, and I went to watch that by myself. And I left — I was solo. It’s not like I was that young. I was like 35. I left every light on in the house. I locked my bedroom down as if it were gonna keep a ghost out.

BUCK: I was gonna say.

CLAY: I blocked it with, like, you know, something that was — to keep the door from being able to be opened, and I could not fall asleep that night.

BUCK: This is why you need to have a Glock 19. Would it do anything against a ghost? No. Yet you feel safer anyway. When I was at a summer camp, I got taken on a rainy day — or, like, a rain day ’cause you couldn’t do the camp stuff on the Blair Witch Project.

CLAY: Oh, yeah.

BUCK: And we were in a camp out in the woods in Vermont —

CLAY: — I wasn’t as afraid of the Blair Witch Project.

BUCK: — a little cabin in the woods right after a 12-year-old or whatever after watching that one. That one scared me. All right. Took a little digression there down scary movies.

But Stephen King tweeted this out. “The one show on CNN I never missed was Reliable Sources with Brian Stelter.”

CLAY: I thought it was satire.

BUCK: “It had been an invaluable window into how the media covers itself. Today CNN canceled it.” How are people that are ostensibly smart and creative so delusional and often dumb, Clay?

CLAY: I saw that tweet and it made me not want to read Stephen King books. Unto that I’m spending a lot of time on them now. And I wonder on some level how many writers have alienated huge percentages of their audience just by getting on social media? Because I don’t really care about Stephen King’s politics at all, right? If you like scary books, you like scary movies — I’ll give you another example. I was in Park City yesterday, and they have a great little bookstore, I think Dolly’s Bookstore right in the center of Park City there, and Jack Carr, who I bought The Terminal List, I want to read it —

BUCK: Jack’s a friend. Have you ever met Jack? Great guy.

CLAY: No, I — he lives in Park City.

BUCK: Oh. We check in; we need to hang out. We gotta go shooting. We’ll learn something.

CLAY: So I — I went in there, and I picked up another book, and I was like, oh, this looks like — you know, the recommended table. I picked it up, I was like, oh, this looks interesting, let me read, who’s the author? I flipped it over, and the author had pronouns in the bio.

BUCK: I’m done. I’m out.

CLAY: And I said I’m not gonna buy this book. Buck, I was a hundred percent gonna buy it. There was part of it set in Nashville. I was like, oh, this sounds — it’s kind of like a spooky book. I was like, this sounds really interesting. Who’s the author? I thought maybe because Vanderbilt University where I went. I was like, oh, maybe I know who this person is. I flipped it over to read the bio, and they had pronouns in the bio — I didn’t know who the person was. I’m not sure that I would know anyway. And I said, I’m not buying this book.

So, in just by reading the author’s pronouns in the bio, I said I can’t enjoy this book because I know too much about the politics of the author.

BUCK: I mean, you know everything you need to know, actually, that you’re not going to enjoy the rest of the experience. It’s 800-282-2882, folks. What do you think the — what should we ask folks about right now? What’s the call right now? Are we asking people scariest movie or we ask them serious stuff — are Republicans gonna win the Senate seat?

CLAY: I like scariest movie. I think we’ve talked about this before, but it never gets old. And I also was gonna make fun of Brian Stelter for that tweet where he talked about how he just curled up in the fetal position and started crying.

BUCK: “Covid’s so scary. So I went home and I cried for hours.”

CLAY: But I — since I just told everybody that I left all the lights on and locked the door after a scary movie, maybe I’m a bigger wuss than Stelter is, even. I don’t know. Maybe —

BUCK: Paranormal Activity is pretty scary. You know what I thought was really scary when I saw it ’cause I was really young was the Bram Stoker’s Dracula with Keanu Reeves who is like, “Whoa, it’s Dracula.”

CLAY: Underrated. You know, that’s a remake of essentially Nosferatu. You ever watch Nosferatu back in the day?

BUCK: Of course. And it’s pretty true to the actual Bram Stoker —

CLAY: That’s right.

BUCK: — novel —

CLAY: Even some of the shots —

BUCK: — amazing, one of the greatest novels of all time, I would argue, for what it is.

CLAY: Some of the shots that they did in Bram Stoker’s Dracula are almost incredibly evocative of the Nosferatu version, which was I think the first horror movie ever made. It’s a silent film. And I remember writing about it in college. I took all these crazy movie courses in college, which I’m an expert or was for a while on German and Russian cinema.

BUCK: Good deal.

CLAY: Not a lot of people to compete with when it comes to German —

BUCK: — gonna go in the deep dive podcast, Clay. Clay’s Russian Cinema Hour.

CLAY: The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. I don’t know what percentage of people out there who have actually watched it, but —

BUCK: Pro tip about Russian cinema and literature. It is cold, and it is depressing. But it will expand your mind.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

BUCK: Reliable Sources not going strong anymore. CNN canceling the show. Apparently, more big changes underway over there. Turns out you can only spend so many years lying to everybody about how you’re a neutral, objective news network when you’re actually just a place for anti-Trump fanatics to gather together. But Clay found some old school — you know, cause the homage to Reliable Sources and Mr. Stelter’s time at CNN continues.

CLAY: Here is —

BUCK: Yeah.

CLAY: I was just gonna say, Buck, I’ll get you to do some Stelter voice. I will start this. This, to me, personifies Brian Stelter and what a huge wuss he is. Again, I say that recognizing that many of you because you just heard me say I left all the lights on in the house after Paranormal Activity might be thinking to yourselves, you know what, Clay? I think Stelter would take you, in a fight. Might just totally wipe me out after the confession that I just made about Paranormal Activity.

But I did want to read this. I wish we had some dramatic music in the background here. But this is Stelter from 2020. “Last night I hit a wall, gutted by the death toll, disturbed by the government shortcomings, dismayed by political rhetoric that bears no resemblance to reality, worried about friends who are losing jobs, kids who are missing school, and center citizens who are living in fear.” Buck, take it away in the Stelter voice.

BUCK: (imitation) “I crawled in bed and cried for our prepandemic 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. Wah.”

CLAY: And then it continues. 17,000 people liked this.

BUCK: That’s almost the funniest part of it.

CLAY: I think Twitter should be shut down —

BUCK: That’s awesome.

CLAY: — for 17,000 people liking this. And then he continued. Two days later he followed up. “Thank you for the thousands of emails and tweets in response to my remarks about the personal, emotional toll of this crisis. @MelissaBrown said it best. It’s okay to not being okay right now, and it’s vital that we open up to each other. When someone asks if you’re okay, tell the truth.”

BUCK: I think we should run some kind of a science experiment where we have — #science — where we just read some of Stelter’s tweets in the pandemic to a roomful of just everyday American men and then check to see if their estrogen levels spike. Because I would argue that it’s a certainty that the estrogen goes through the roof when Stelterisms are unleashed.

CLAY: If you are a grown man and you curl up in the fetal position and cry by yourself in your bed on a regular basis, first of all, you need massive amounts of help. Secondly, I don’t understand why you would deserve to be praised for sharing that. Like, I am a grown man, and I am so unable to cope with what’s going on in the world — first of all, you’re a journalist, all right? You’re not losing your job. You sit and read off a teleprompter on television. Your job is, in the grand scheme of things, neither difficult nor grandly important. Of course, journalists, I think, more than any other profession in the world praise themselves over this.

But being emotionally unstable as a grown man and sharing your emotional instability like Stelter did there does not, to me, make me think, like, oh, I really want to hear more of what this guy is saying. Right? I hope he gets better, and I hope he stops crying one day like I hope that everybody who cries stops. Buck, like, the idea that that would make me want to watch his broadcast more and think, oh, I trust this guy’s opinion more, which is what he’s going for, I find it in — well, certainly most people don’t because they stopped watching.

BUCK: And so everyone, why is there such a focus on this? You know, I think our friend — our friend Sean Hannity did a little Stelter homage on his TV show on Fox a nightly or two ago. Why do people on the right find this annoying or not just him annoying, ’cause that’s obvious, but the whole purpose of his show — there is an entire category within news media of people whose jobs are to report on the media.

CLAY: That’s right.

BUCK: But really their job is to name and shame and deplatform conservatives whenever possible. Their whole purpose is to feed the deranged left that is their audience this idea that everything that’s being said on talk radio is just stirring up, you know, a civil war, and everybody’s a white supremacist who’s a Republican and the media — all this stuff. So, they’re just attack dogs, and they do it dishonestly. They never debate.

I told you, the one time I was ever on Stelter’s show, he tried to come at me on something about counterterrorism. He’s basically, he’s saying, how did you know this was a jihadist attack before CNN would say so? And I was essentially able to tell him because the guy was screaming Allahu Akbar, I’m doing this for ISIS. Usually a good indicator of where you’re coming from with the motivation, and they never aired it, Clay. They literally just pretended like I didn’t even appear on the show because cowardice for the media that reports on right-wing media, that’s just the standard operating procedure.

CLAY: Amen. And good riddance, sweet prince, Brian Stelter. I saw that Greg Gutfeld offered you a job. Maybe you should take it. If you did, people might actually see you on television instead of on CNN. They’d be watching Fox News. And people would probably decide, they probably don’t like you very much.