'It appears Brian isn’t the only bully in the Stelter family,' Scott Jones said
CNN’s Brian Stelter has built a career off anonymously sourced reports on behind-the-scenes media drama and his style of palace intrigue reporting is now happening to his own family, as his newscaster wife has been accused of workplace bullying by unnamed colleagues.
Stelter is married to NY1 traffic reporter and anchor Jamie Stelter, and her station has been plagued by a variety of issues, such as a lawsuit filed by five female anchors for age and gender discrimination that was settled last year.
Anonymous colleagues told Caitlin Moscatello of New York Magazine that Stelter is part of the problem in a piece headlined, "Inside the Petty, Vindictive, Career-Ruining Infighting at NY1" that was published on Monday.
"It appears Brian isn’t the only bully in the Stelter family,’ TV news blogger Scott Jones wrote after reading the piece.
"Colleagues say she and [business anchor Annika] Pergament began to behave like ‘high-school bullies,’ openly gossiping about co-workers — sometimes with their mics still on," Moscatello wrote after speaking with 51 former and current NY1 staffers.
The lengthy, inside look at NY1 uses mostly anonymous sources to paint the local network as a terrible place to work with anchor Pat Kiernan at the center of the majority of its issues. Stelter and Pergament are Kiernan’s co-anchors and the "trio are represented by the same agent and are friends off-camera," according to Moscatello.
Kiernan recently joined the Stelters and CNN’s Jeffrey Toobin at a New York City party, according to TVNewser.
"Kiernan even helped set up Stelter with her husband, CNN host Brian Stelter. It’s a story she tells so often it’s included in her bio on the NY1 website," Moscatello wrote, adding that a colleague claimed Kiernan was the "deciding factor" on decisions regarding the morning show he co-anchors with his pal Stelter.
"A lot of people don’t like working with Jamie," an anonymous staffer told Moscatello while another claimed Stelter would openly complain about everything from how stylists did her hair to what staffers wore.
"People would avoid her," a third anonymous source told Moscatello.