Amid the fallout that has already occurred from CNN’s having been caught publishing out-and-out lies and being forced to retract an article in its entirety, one of its reporters is complaining that “he don’t get no respect.” His name is Jim Acosta, and he is the network’s senior White House correspondent. And he wants you to know that hack reporters have feelings too. So upset was he that he was recently assigned a seat in the back row of the White House press briefing room that he began sobbing on camera. (If you look closely at the above photo, you can see a tear in the corner of his left eye.)
But Acosta’s beef isn’t just personal. He is mad that the mainstream media in general are being treated shabbily by the Trump administration. This came to a head at Tuesday’s daily press briefing, which was led by Deputy Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders. After the briefing — which, nota bene, included questions taken from reporters who work at CBS, NBC, NPR, Bloomberg News, and other “elite” media outlets — an exasperated Acosta tweeted:
Does this feel like America? Where the White House takes q's from conservatives, then openly trashes the news media in the briefing room.
— Jim Acosta (@Acosta) June 27, 2017
Will this presidential election be the most important in American history?
The Daily Mail’s David Martosko had an excellent comeback:
Horrid. Used to be that the White House would take Q’s from liberals and then trash conservatives in the briefing room. https://t.co/BqoKAu3s7S
— David Martosko (@dmartosko) June 27, 2017
I don’t know if Acosta was present later yesterday when Donald Trump politely asked the press to leave after his opening remarks at a White House round table on the status of the health care that included Senate Republicans. The request comes at around 1:41 in the video:
Maybe Acosta would feel more loved if he were singled out by the president in the manner that Fox News’s James Rosen was accorded “special treatment” by the Obama administration. Rosen was secretly designated a criminal co-conspirator and flight risk by Obama’s Justice Department as a pretext to being granted permission by a federal judge to rifle through the reporter’s emails.