Fox News media critic Howard Kurtz has a hunch that CNN’s journalistic diva, Jim Acosta, might be biased against President Donald Trump.
In what should have been a humiliating moment for any journalist, Acosta appeared to confirm a “personal vendetta” against the president when he admitted that he won’t cover Joe Biden with the same melodrama that has become familiar to many, Kurtz said Wednesday, according to Fox.
Under fire
Acosta is one of Trump’s most infamous critics in the press and, to Trump’s supporters, something of a figure of fun. The reporter has become known for his stridently partisan commentary and bombastic, self-righteous antics, which at one time got him banned from the White House.
With Trump’s putative defeat, there has been speculation that journalists will treat Joe Biden with kid gloves.
Acosta seemed to confirm that to The Atlantic on Tuesday, telling the magazine that people should not expect the press to treat Biden’s presidency like “must-see TV,” despite several years of churning media drama under Trump.
Kurtz, for his part, said that Acosta’s comments show that he and other journalists have an ax to grind with the president.
“Now to say that the Biden presidency will be approached differently, it’s not very hard to crack that code,” he told Fox’s America’s Newsroom. “Acosta, and there will be others, I assure you, that have no intention of aggressively covering the Biden tenure.”
“Hazard pay”
The Atlantic article describes the tremendous, but perhaps evanescent, boon Trump has been to partisan reporters in the “Resistance,” such as Acosta.
In his latest dispatches from the trenches, the CNN anchor said that covering the Trump White House was a “non-stop national emergency” that necessitates “hazard pay,” but he expects that to change.
“I don’t think the press should be trying to whip up the Biden presidency and turn it into must-see TV in a contrived way,” Acosta told The Atlantic. “If being at the White House is not an experience that might merit hazard pay…then perhaps it is going to be approached differently.”
Meanwhile, reporter Olivia Nuzzi confessed that many journalists probably won’t feel as “safe” covering Biden critically. “On a purely social level, I don’t know that reporting critically on Joe Biden will feel as safe for reporters,” she told the magazine.
Acosta’s CNN colleague Jake Tapper made similar comments on air recently: “I kind of suspect that news media coverage will change as a more, you know, ‘normal’ president takes office,” he said, according to The Washington Times.
The post CNN's Jim Acosta comes under fire for suggesting Biden White House will be covered 'differently' first appeared on Conservative Institute.
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