Whew! Biden won’t have to worry about being ‘Acosta-ed’ as CNN shakes it up
During the Trump era, CNN White House correspondent Jim Acosta was like that blue-gold dress photo that circulated on social media a couple of years ago.
Like some who saw the dress, to Democrats, run-of-the-mill lefties and his colleagues in the mainstream media, Acosta was “gold.”
He was a relentless pursuer of truth, speaking truth to power, dragging uncomfortable facts into the sunshine, holding Washington’s power elite – especially our outlaw president – accountable, a paragon of what the Founding Fathers intended when they crafted the First Amendment.
To the rest of real, sane America, he was “blue.”
To that side, Acosta was a Democratic operative behind a reporter’s chyron; an insufferable, self-promoting, self-aggrandizing blowhard whose only job was to cudgel the president while rarely letting the facts get in the way of a good (for liberals) story.
Yet there is good news for the incoming Biden administration: they won’t have Acosta to kick around anymore.
CNN this week announced changes to its reporting line-up, and Acosta was off the White House beat. Some observers believed that CNN was making a concession to Joe Biden by yanking “performance artist Jim Acosta,” as conservative strategist Chris Barron dubbed him on Fox News, in favor of someone more docile and submissive.
Hmm 🤔, CNN is taking Jim Acosta off the White House now that Trump is leaving. That wouldn’t be because they only wanted Acosta and his irritable brand of rudeness for Trump, would it? Nah, they’re not that cynical are they? ….are they?
— TheGipper (@gipper_the) January 11, 2021
One sad – if not the saddest – development of President Donald Trump’s tenure is how the national media members debased themselves by deluding themselves into believing that they, like the rest of “The Resistance” nitwits, were fighting for some greater good rather than simply running into the political ring and launching a few dropkicks like the villain’s tag-team partner in a WWE match.
And to those journalists, who somehow fooled themselves into believing the president lacks his own First Amendment rights, Acosta was their champion – with his signature moves of disguising long-winded soliloquies as queries and yelling questions at sources from some venue where they could not be heard, and then “reporting” that they ducked the question.
Or his other schtick: repeatedly accusing Trump of being a “wannabe dictator” who regularly menaced freedom of the press by charging “fake news” and “enemy of the people.” Acosta recently suggested, with a straight face, that covering trump may warrant “hazard pay.”
Yes, Trump was such an evil strongman who threatened the press’s liberty that Acosta was able to appear on TV practically every day and call Trump names – such as last fall when he said Trump would soon be just “another crackpot on the Internet” – and tell America how awful he was. And how can we forget Trump’s Q&A with the press corps when he told a staffer to seize the mic from Acosta for a ridiculous question and Acosta grappled with the young woman. Ah, good times.
If Trump was a dictator, he pretty bad at it. Acosta surely knows that his counterparts in, for instance, Russia, China, or the Philippines understand full well that, if they behave as he does, they end up in an “undisclosed location” pushing up daisies.
As Tim Graham of the conservative Media Research Center told Fox News, Acosta’s “raging, lecturing routine has no place in the Biden press corps. The transition from rabid lion to Poppin Fresh would have been stunning. What we’re to get now is repeaters, not reporters. The liberal networks say they won’t be ‘stenographers to power,’ but that’s exactly what they sound like most of the time when they are covering Democrats.”
CNN pulls combative questioner Jim Acosta from White House beat with Biden set to take officehttps://t.co/xIVjpr97sU
Really? I thought he was CNN’s top guy? Oh what a sad time for him.. Wait a minute🤔 Trump is leaving to go where? Oh,, so we did have a legal election?
— MC (@MAGAmc1970) January 11, 2021
Graham has a point.
It’s debatable whether Acosta would have been as tough, or as unfair, to Biden as he was to Trump. After all, as Acosta himself noted on Twitter, he covered President Barack Obama for four years before taking on Trump. Anyone remember him being as gruff, disrespectful, or as grandstanding back then? Of course not. Trump made him a household name, for better or worse
Yet clearly the media’s deference to our most senior-citizen president – in CNN’s case, by removing Acosta – demonstrates that they don’t want to hear Biden yell at reporters to get off his White House lawn.
Well, farewell Jim. You’re gone and hopefully soon forgotten.
