New York – Enemy Of The People? CNN’s Acosta Defends Press, And Himself

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    FILE - In this Feb. 15, 2019 file photo, Jim Acosta of CNN asks President Donald Trump a question during an event in the Rose Garden at the White House in Washington.   (AP Photo/Susan Walsh, File)New York – Wherever CNN White House correspondent Jim Acosta goes, he’s followed by the g-word, grandstand. He even heard it when he met Ted Olson, the former U.S. solicitor general who was part of the legal team that beat back President Donald Trump’s attempt to pull Acosta’s reporting pass.

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    “I can’t believe there is grandstanding going on at the White House,” Olson told him, and they both laughed, Acosta recounts in his new book.

    Usually, it’s no laughing matter. Trump’s detractors love Acosta’s willingness to talk back to the president in attention-getting confrontations. Trump’s supporters seethe. Acosta takes Trump on again with the book, “The Enemy of the People,” which uses as its title the derisive phrase the president calls the press.

    The incident that required Olson’s intervention came after a contentious White House news conference last November at which Acosta was called on and said, “I wanted to challenge you on one of the statements that you made in the tail end of the campaign in the midterms.”

    “Here we go,” Trump said, and off they went.

    It ended with a back-and-forth about how many questions Acosta got to ask, and a White House intern unsuccessfully trying to grab Acosta’s microphone. The administration later pulled Acosta’s pass to the White House grounds, triggering the court battle won by CNN.

    “Jim Acosta is just somebody who gets up and grandstands,” Trump later told the Daily Caller in an interview. “He doesn’t even know what he’s asking you half the time.”

    Conservative activists L. Brent Bozell and Tim Graham unloaded on Acosta in their own book, “Unmasked: Big Media’s War Against Trump.” ”No man in the world of journalism has made a mockery of his profession quite like this man,” they wrote. “He lives to be obnoxious.”

    Washington Post media columnist Erik Wemple countered that news organizations are free to choose reporters with their own styles.

    “Yes, it’s grandstanding and who cares?” Wemple said in an online commentary.

    Acosta mostly deflects the question in an interview, although he said he takes exception to the characterization. He takes it on much more strongly in his book.

    “Call me a showboater or a grandstander or ‘fake news,'” he wrote. “I will go to my grave convinced deep down in my bones that journalists are performing a public service for the good of the country. The country is better off with reporters in the White House briefing room asking the hard questions, even if we sometimes sound a little over the top. That noise is the sound that a healthy, functioning democracy makes.”

    After a series of unexploded pipe bombs were sent to CNN and others, Acosta tried to get White House press secretary Sarah Sanders to state publicly which outlets and journalists the administration considered enemies of the people. If anyone thinks he was showboating, Acosta writes, “they can shove it.”

    Acosta said he wrote the book because he didn’t want his two children to grow up in a country where the press is called the enemy.

    “I know that sounds corny or like I’m on a soapbox,” he said. “I just think that’s kind of baseline. The press is here to do a job … And we just can’t have that sort of thing going on.”

    His book explores the origin of the much-tweeted “enemy of the people” phrase. His sources pointed to former Trump aide Steve Bannon, with the president’s help. Acosta recounts a phone call with then-Trump aide Hope Hicks in the early days of the president’s attacks on the media; she said Trump told her that Acosta “gets it.” He took that to indicate that, at least in the beginning, the “fake news” and “enemy of the people” charges were primarily an act.

    It’s gone far beyond that, to the point where Acosta and other White House reporters are repeatedly threatened and subject to angry chants when they work a Trump rally.

    Acosta criticizes Sanders and her predecessor Sean Spicer, with whom he had plenty of verbal sparring matches when the White House conducted regular press briefings. He’s offended by his sense that Trump aides aren’t motivated to serve the public that pays their salaries.

    Acosta also writes that there are not two sides to a story when it is a matter of right and wrong. As examples, he cites the separation of migrant children from their families, and Trump’s comments after a demonstration that included white supremacists in Charlottesville, Virginia, that there were good people on both sides.

    So will Acosta takes sides when right and wrong are not clear-cut?

    He said he’s not referring to debates over tax policy or climate change, for example. But he said he had no problem telling Trump, in one encounter, “Mr. President, there are no fine people in the Nazis.”

    White House reporters never expected to spend so much time fact-checking an administration, but Acosta believes that most of those covering Trump will be seen by history as having done tough jobs well.

    “As reporters these days, we’re not just here to report the news. We’re here to defend the truth,” he said. “We didn’t put ourselves in that position. He essentially put us in that position.”

    Besides the jeers he gets at Trump rallies, Acosta writes of receiving disturbing death threats. He’s disheartened that so many Americans are at each other’s throats, and he wants to call Trump out on language he believes contributes to it.

    Despite the job’s difficulties, Acosta’s not looking to leave. You sense that he’d like nothing more than to outlast Trump.

    “I kind of want to see how the movie ends,” he said.


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    10 Comments
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    4 years ago

    Of course AP will lionize this miscreant but let us not be fooled this guy is a loathsome individual who deserves only derision.

    AmYisroel
    AmYisroel
    4 years ago

    Acosta is a lying propagandist spewing fake news for the democrat party

    Frumsanity
    Frumsanity
    4 years ago

    I take issue that he wrote the book because “he didn’t want his 2 children to grow up in a country….. ” that’s full of baloney he wrote the book to promote and defend his outrageous chutzpah… he’s an evil man

    qazxc
    qazxc
    4 years ago

    If it weren’t for journalists challenging politicians and publicizing government failures another 57,000 and another 57,000 and another and another of my generation would have gone off to die in the Vietnamese civil war.

    4 years ago

    Acosta should be in jail for abusing a white house intern. The so called “judge” who is a lair and faker allowed him to return to the WH. His press pass should be revoked. Sure the never trumpers continue to lie and say he never abused anyone. i saw the damn video and you can’t deny that the man pushed away that intern. I saw the unaltered video he pushed her hands away. now you’ll argue that was just a knee jerk reaction but when a Trump dude foes that you guys are all over him. And he surely was mocking her by ignoring her because she was only a young intern.

    We also now know that the man lied re the crisis at the border. go look at the overflow of migrants. Its quite obvious that the migrants are a crisis.

    is the media the enemy of the people? Well when they rig the questions so Hillary gets it before the debate, that don’t seem fair. When NPR interviews a Republican and Trump supporter and steve Inskip asks the most rough out to trap you questions while giving dems a soft easier tone that’s unfair. When the failing NYT lies andprints anti israel cartoons or equates terror with just a conflict and sympathizes with Palestinians when jews are slaughtered thats evil

    puppydogs
    puppydogs
    4 years ago

    I stopped watching CNN because of him. He isn’t a journalist.

    qazxc
    qazxc
    4 years ago

    Because he asks questions Trumpty Dumpty doesn’t want to answer?