The Patriot Post® · CNN's Jim Acosta Can't Take What He Dishes
CNN reporter Jim Acosta was in Tampa, Florida, covering President Donald Trump’s Tuesday rally. At one point during Acosta’s live coverage of the event, a group of Trump supporters loudly chanted “CNN sucks!” Acosta, whose obsessively negative anti-Trump reporting has earned the ire of both the president and many conservatives, sought to portray the behavior of the rally-goers in the worst and most dramatic light possible. “Just a sample of the sad scene we faced at the Trump rally in Tampa,” he lamented from the fainting couch. “I’m very worried that the hostility whipped up by Trump and some in conservative media will result in somebody getting hurt. We should not treat our fellow Americans this way. The press is not the enemy.”
Where was Acosta’s concern over “hostility whipped up” by people at anti-Trump rallies? Or how about his own insinuation that Trump supporters are dangerously stupid? In an interview with Variety, he haughtily asserted, “They don’t have all their faculties and in some cases their elevator might not hit all floors.”
As Mark Alexander noted yesterday, however, it’s leftists who often suffer Trump Derangement Syndrome.
Acosta complained, “[Trump] is whipping these crowds up into a frenzy to the point where they really want to come after us.” Nothing like Maxine Waters calling for harassment of Trump officials, or a Bernie Sanders fanboy attempting to murder Republicans, we’re sure.
But Acosta also leveled blame at Fox News, adding, “My sense of it is that these opinions these folks have at these rallies, they’re shaped by what they see in the primetime hours of Fox News and what they hear from some conservative news outlets that just sort of give them this daily diet of what they consider to be terrible things we do over here at CNN.” He even had the gumption to accuse Fox opinion commentator Sean Hannity of “peddling lies every night” “for profit.” Talk about throwing stones from glass houses. The irony here is that Acosta is the one who claims the mantel of a journalist, something Hannity regularly notes he is not. Yet Acosta assumes that his own opinion of Hannity equates to journalistic reporting of the truth. That’s not journalism; it’s hubris.
It’s precisely this elitist, condescending, know-it-all attitude regularly displayed by much of the mainstream media that has brought on Americans’ ire and distrust. Hannity was kind enough to point this out to Acosta, stating, “I’m actually going to give your network some advice, if you have an open mind and an open heart, maybe a little bit of humility. The people of this country are screaming at you for a reason. They don’t like your unfair, abusively biased treatment of the president of the United States.” That, in a nutshell, is why Acosta will continue to fail.
Addendum: As Mollie Hemingway astutely put it, “Donald Trump did not create distrust of the media, distrust of the media helped create Donald Trump.”
And another interesting addition, Research Intelligencer polling indicates that the top three most trusted TV news brands are BBC at 90%, Fox News at 87% and PBS at 86%.