Brian Stelter attends the 11th annual CNN Heroes: An All-Star Tribute at the American Museum of Natural History on Sunday, Dec. 17, 2017, in New York. (Photo by Evan Agostini/Invision/AP)

The answer is: Hiring CNN host Brian Stelter to work on an HBO documentary about fake news.

It’s true. Warner Media, the parent company of both CNN and HBO, announced that the documentary, entitled “After Truth: Disinformation and the Cost of Fake News,” “will examine the phenomenon of “fake news” in the age of social media and the impact that the trend has on average citizens.”

Brian Stelter, the host of CNN’s “Reliable Sources,” is the executive producer. On Wednesday, he tweeted that he has been working on this project for a couple of years.

HBO just announced something I've been working on for a couple of years: A documentary titled "AFTER TRUTH: DISINFORMATION AND THE COST OF FAKE NEWS." The film will premiere on TV and online this March. Directed by @a_rossi!

— Brian Stelter (@brianstelter) January 15, 2020

Stelter certainly knows his subject. In fact, he is an expert. Just like Andrew McCabe is an expert on how to deceive a FISA Court judge into granting a surveillance warrant when there’s no justification for it.

Maybe this is supposed to be like hiring a criminal to tell homeowners the various ways a thief might break into their home to prevent a future burglary? Unfortunately, I don’t think that was the intention in either case.

CNN’s ratings have cratered over the last year precisely because the network has reported so much fake news. The sharpest decline came after the Mueller report was released in March 2019 when their viewers learned they’d been lied to for the past two years.

Last week, CNN settled a lawsuit filed by Covington Catholic High School student Nick Sandman. Sandman “alleged the network defamed him in its coverage of his confrontation with a group of activists during a pro-life rally. The lawsuit alleged the network put its anti-Trump bias ahead of journalistic standards in portraying Sandmann as the aggressor. Full video of the incident revealed that the Covington students didn’t initiate the confrontation.”

In October, James O’Keefe’s Project Veritas released dozens of videos from their #ExposeCNN undercover series. The whistleblower, Cary Poarch, who had been working at CNN as a satellite link technician at the Washington CNN Bureau, was stunned by the amount of  propaganda he saw the network pumping out. He told O’Keefe, “I didn’t see any other option…I decided to wear a hidden camera to expose the bias.” He made numerous recordings of conversations with colleagues as well as meetings led by Jeff Zucker, the network’s President.

Poarch records one employee saying he can’t believe CNN hasn’t been able to take down President Trump yet.

Repeatedly, employees talk about Zucker’s hatred for Trump. Nick Neville, a media coordinator at the network, says that Zucker has a “personal vendetta” against Trump.

Zucker often told his employees that Fox reported fake news. On one occasion, he said:

I think what’s going on in America now is really fundamentally the result of years of fake news, conspiracy nonsense from Fox News. The fake conspiracy nonsense that Fox has spread for years is now deeply embedded into American society and frankly, that is beyond destructive for America.

No single clip was especially damning. We see a conscious effort on the part of CNN’s leader, Jeff Zucker, to shape the narrative, the way the network will cover an individual or a story, rather than reporting the news.

The recordings revealed an organization with a political agenda which they were working to advance.

To say the least, it’s ironic that Stelter would be working in a serious way on this project.