CNN White House correspondent Jim Acosta may have lost whatever credibility he has left with his viewers on Thursday when he accused President Donald Trump of endangering his life. Speaking to students at the Oxford Union Society in the United Kingdom, Acosta argued that when Trump calls members of the press “the enemy of the people,” he creates an environment where journalists could be murdered.
Public Enemy No. 1
“Perhaps they won’t stop calling us the enemy of the people because it works so well with their people, but all of this adds up to one painful reality: this is a dangerous time to tell the truth in America,” the CNN reporter told his audience. Acosta said that employing such rhetoric creates “an atmosphere where people can get hurt, where journalists can get murdered.”
Hello Oxford! pic.twitter.com/99wINxtQbl
— Jim Acosta (@Acosta) January 31, 2019
This wasn’t the first time Acosta has portrayed his job as a hazardous endeavor. He details his experiences covering the White House in an upcoming book titled The Enemy of the People: A Dangerous Time to Tell the Truth in America. Scheduled for release on June 11, the Associated Press described Acosta’s tell-all as “never-before-revealed stories of this White House’s rejection of truth, while laying out the stakes for how Trump’s hostility toward facts poses an unprecedented threat to our democracy.”
Acosta plugged his book in a recent interview with CNN’s Brian Stelter, describing the hardships he has been forced to endure covering the Trump administration. “Simply put, I am writing this book to share what I’ve experienced covering President Trump during his first two years in office. This sobering, bewildering, and sometimes frightening experience has made it absolutely clear that this is a dangerous time to tell the truth in America.”
Grandstanding
Acosta stands out among the White House press pool for the adversarial tone he employs when questioning Trump or his staff. Unlike most reporters, who use the opportunity to gather information about White House policy, Acosta lobs loaded questions at the president to score points with his liberal viewership.
Oftentimes, Acosta is seen shouting down the president long after a press conference has ended, and he frequently has to be asked several times to leave. The insurgent reporter seems to save his most provocative and insulting questions for when Trump is entertaining foreign dignitaries, like when he leveled charges of racism at the Republican commander-in-chief during a joint press conference with Kazakhstan President Nursultan Nazarbayev.
But most Americans remember Acosta as the reporter who refused to relinquish his microphone during a particularly contentious press conference with the president, strong-arming a diminutive White House intern in the process. That unbecoming act cost Acosta his White House press pass, prompting the network to sue the administration.
It was an absurd argument — that Acosta has a constitutional right to behave like an undisciplined delinquent during White House press briefings — but when a federal judge ordered Acosta’s credentials restored until the matter could be settled in court, the White House surrendered their case and instead imposed strict guidelines governing the conduct of reporters.
Nothing but the truth
The move appears to have temporarily succeeded in muzzling the cable news reporter, especially now that White House briefings are an increasingly rare occurrence. But that hasn’t stopped Acosta from making his rounds on the liberal news circuit to hawk his anti-Trump autobiography.
“The president and his team, not to mention some of his supporters, have attempted to silence the press in ways we have never seen before,” Mr. Acosta told Stelter. “As just about everybody has seen, I have witnessed this first hand. As difficult as that challenge may be for the free press in America, we must continue to do our jobs and report the news. The truth is worth the fight.”
“The truth” hasn’t exactly been a media strong point lately. Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s Office took the rare step of setting the record straight after a Buzzfeed News report falsely accused the president of suborning perjury earlier this month, and who can forget how the mainstream press jumped to conclusions and smeared a group of Kentucky high-school kids without fact-checking first.
But don’t expect Acosta to write about these scenes, or about how his own network would rather discuss Trump’s preference for sugary soft drinks than report on an emerging terrorist attack. While it may be going too far to label the entire media establishment the “enemy of the people,” Acosta is certainly no friend to conservative Americans.
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