WH Press Briefing 8/2/17

It looks like CNN White House correspondent Jim Acosta might be making another diary entry soon. The attention-hungry journalist, who is known for trying to make each press conference about himself, just received a sharp rebuke from Jon Karl, the president of the White House Correspondents’ Association and a reporter for ABC News.

In his book “Front Row at the Trump Show,” and in multiple interviews, Karl slammed Acosta’s conduct during press briefings. In his book, he criticizes Acosta for “playing into the explicit Trump strategy of portraying the press as the opposition party,” and intimated that he should not “give speeches from the White House briefing room.”

In an interview with The Daily Beast, he expanded on his criticism of the CNN reporter. “Regarding Jim Acosta, to paraphrase Voltaire, I will defend to the death his right to report from the White House, but I have some issues with the style in which he has done so … We can be tough, we can call out things that are not true, we can be aggressive in our questioning, but I don’t think we should act like we are part of the resistance.”

Acosta has frequently used press briefings as a vehicle to draw more attention to himself and to put his virtue signaling on full display in front of the American public. White House press secretaries, including Sarah Huckabee Sanders, have given him verbal beatdowns on numerous occasions. The President himself has sparred with the journalist.

One of the most well-known conflagrations between the White House and Acosta occurred shortly after the 2018 midterm elections when the reporter refused to hand the microphone to an intern after Trump declined to answer one of his questions. His petulance in that scenario cost him his White House press credential much to the dismay of the corporate media, which engaged in a concerted campaign of whining and pearl clutching.

But what if Karl is right about the fact that people like Acosta are playing into Trump’s hands? The President has been criticizing the media since he was running for the presidency, calling them out for their skewed and dishonest reporting. Media bias is something that conservatives have railed against for years, and now, there is a Republican president willing to fight back.

We have seen how the media fared when dealing with a president who wasn’t afraid to call them out in the harshest of terms. In essence, by continually highlighting the activism in the fourth estate, he dared them to continue pushing their left-wing agenda – and the press obliged. When Acosta, and others in the corporate media behave in the unhinged fashion to which we have grown accustomed, they are demonstrating that Trump is right.

American trust in the media has plummeted since Trump came on the scene – and rightly so. Several studies have shown that people don’t believe the press as readily as they have previously. There can be no doubt that the President, along with the advent of alternative media, has played a vital role in this shift. But will the media ever learn from this? Of course not. It seems they still believe that their reportage can still sway people to their way of thinking, and in the long run, this will only benefit the conservative movement.

Let me know what you think in the comments below!

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