The White House’s decision to take away Jim Acosta’s press pass was an appropriate response to a rude reporter who stepped out of line.
Predictably, CNN is standing by their ace heckler with a lawsuit and the rest of the media is denouncing this “unprecedented” attack on the “free, independent press.”
If anything, the press could use some humbling.
Acosta was rude and aggressive, repeatedly interrupted the president, and would not pass along the microphone to the next reporter when asked.
It doesn’t take a Constitutional scholar to reason that Acosta is not entitled to waste the president’s time with this aimless, petulant “journalism.”
The president has rights too, and he is allowed to stand up for himself against hostile, malicious reporters. He doesn’t need to keep Acosta around if he doesn’t want to.
The press’s response has been pretty straightforward: we’re reporters, and it’s our job to be aggressive when asking questions. Society depends on people like us to keep the powerful in check.
Journalists have a right to ask tough questions, sure. But the First Amendment doesn’t give them a privilege to bully others and then complain when criticized. They can’t take what they dish out.
With the “free press,” aggression is a one-way street. They get to heckle, but when the president puts his foot down, he’s acting like a dictator.
The press is shielded from arbitrary suppression by the First Amendment. But CNN isn’t being muzzled, and neither is the press corps. A single journalist is being disciplined for rude behavior.
With the ever-melodramatic media, though, it’s never that simple. This is an attack not just on Acosta, but on CNN, the media, the Constitution — even democracy itself. As they would have it, they are the only ones standing between freedom and fascism.
When criticized, the media falls back on the tired narrative that they are heroes who report nothing but the truth. It’s the job of these brave protectors of democracy to hold would-be dictators accountable with “the facts,” as if they were just neutral observers without any power or interests of their own.
In the media world, journalists are always right and their critics are always wrong. Acosta is the victim, and Trump is the bully. It is impossible for Trump to be treated unfairly because he is the bad guy and they are the good guys fighting for “the truth.”
But reporters like Jim Acosta are not as vulnerable as they want to appear. The great irony is that today’s journalists are bullies themselves, and they don’t report “just the facts.”
The media isn’t checking the powerful. They are the powerful. Their aggressive “truth-seeking” is aggressive political activism.
Like most journalists in the liberal media, Acosta is a political activist. He did not ask tough, probing questions, but prejudiced ones. He insisted on arguing with the president about the caravan and the Russia collusion investigation with the apparent purpose of insinuating that he is a racist demagogue who is afraid of impeachment.
Arguing with the president about his decision to call an invasion of migrants by its proper name is political performance art, not news. Acosta seems to enjoy sparring with the president for attention rather than any newsworthy purpose.
Journalists have a right to aggressively seek facts, but today’s journalists have kept the aggression part and left out all the facts.
They aren’t protecting democracy any more than they are reporting the truth. These are the same people who spent the last two years trying to discredit democracy because they can’t accept that Trump won the election. How exactly is this corrupt media establishment safeguarding democracy and the Constitution?
It’s becoming clearer all the time that the media is in the business of gas-lighting, not reporting. Their job is to convince the public that what they see happening in the world is not actually happening.
The New York Times would rather have Americans who “enrolled” in the military (yes, “enrolled“) protect foreign borders instead of America’s own.
CNN’s idea of hard-hitting journalism is to send attack dogs to the White House to square off with the president about what to call a group of hundreds of migrants trampling over the border and quibble over how many miles away they are.
Trump could not have asked for a less sympathetic foil than Acosta. The media, in their limitless lack of self-awareness, can’t help but turn him into a martyr.
But to those outside the New York-Washington media bubble, Acosta’s stuff isn’t journalism, and reporters like him are no heroes. They’re preening narcissists with an ideological ax to grind, and they aren’t entitled to be in the White House.
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