Sarah Huckabee Sanders answers questions from a more subdued Jim Acosta in Tuesday press briefing

All eyes were on CNN’s combative chief White House correspondent Jim Acosta during his first day back on the job on Tuesday after he had his press pass revoked earlier this month for refusing to relinquish the floor to other reporters. Following a short-lived legal battle, the White House agreed to restore Acosta’s credentials — but Acosta doesn’t seem to feel welcome back.

Acosta appeared noticeably subdued on Tuesday after he was called upon to ask questions by White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders at a briefing. And conservatives everywhere were thankful for it.

Media muzzle

Acosta appears to have experienced a radical attitude adjustment since the first week of November, when he refused to surrender a microphone and swatted away an intern who attempted to repossess it. Rather than report the news, Acosta preferred to become the subject of headlines, and he had spent the last two years lobbing controversial questions at the president and debating his press secretaries.

“Let me be clear: Jim Acosta is not a reporter,” Media Research Center founder Brent Bozell said. “He is a left-wing activist. He has proven on countless occasions that he is more interested in disrupting and debating the President than asking serious questions. As far as the administration is concerned,” Bozell added, “CNN is not a news organization but a political hit squad for the far left.”

Conservative Institute agrees, and has banned the leftist cable news outlet as a source in its own reporting and commentary.

“CNN has repeatedly made clear that they don’t consider themselves an objective media source,” explained Conservative Institute founder and CEO Shaun Connell. “They are now nothing more than a propaganda organization at war with the Trump White House and have no credibility.”

That war continued on Tuesday, albeit with a restrained tone. Sanders allowed the Acosta to ask one question with two follow-up queries, despite reserving the discretion to limit the CNN correspondent’s time or ignore him altogether under new White House rules governing the conduct of press pool reporters, which were obviously written with Acosta in mind. They include:

1. A journalist called upon to ask a question will ask a single question and then will yield the floor to other journalists;
2. At the discretion of the President or other White House official taking questions, a follow-up question or questions may be permitted; and where a follow up has been allowed and asked, the questioner will then yield the floor;
3. “Yielding the floor” includes, when applicable, physically surrendering the microphone to White House staff for use by the next questioner;
4. Failure to abide by any of rules (1)-(3) may result in suspension or revocation of the journalist’s hard pass.

The new Jim

After a three-week hiatus, Acosta’s first question on Tuesday was regarding former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort and the special counsel investigation. Sanders refused to take the bait, providing a clear and concise response.

“Not only has the president, but the entire administration has been fully cooperative with the special counsel’s office, providing hours and hours of sit-downs as well as over 4 million pages of documents,” she said. “We continue to be cooperative. We also know there was no collusion, and we’re ready for this to wrap up.”

“Why doesn’t he have faith in his advisers?” Acosta also asked, referring to Trump’s refusal to condemn Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) for allegedly ordering the death of Islamist reporter Jamal Khashoggi. An interim CIA report determined with “high confidence” that MBS supervised the assassination.

But Trump’s reluctance to jump to conclusions based on an interim report hardly qualifies as lacking “faith” in the U.S. intelligence community, Sanders explained.

“That’s not accurate. That’s not true… The president has faith in the intelligence community and certainly in the team that he has assembled around him,” she said. “There’s really nothing else to add on that front.”

Old habits die hard

Old habits die hard, and soon Acosta found himself belaboring the point, alleging that “[Trump] doesn’t believe the CIA.” But Sanders shut down the activist-reporter before events escalated.

“We haven’t seen definitive evidence come from our intelligence community that ties him directly to that. What we have seen is a number of individuals that we know are tied to that, and those individuals have been sanctioned,” Sanders said before moving on to another reporter.