Tag: Acosta

Eight years ago, CNN‘s Jim Acosta earned the moniker of “chief antagonist for a network that styles itself as [Donald] Trump’s chief antagonist.”

Now, as the nation prepares for a second Trump term, the newly inaugurated president may get his revenge.

In a sign of the times, CNN put Acosta out of the network’s new weekday programming lineup, replacing the anchor’s 10 a.m. show with The Situation Room With Wolf Blitzer and Pamela Brown. For the time being, Acosta is still expected to anchor during that time slot.

A CNN spokesperson told Newsweek the network is “in active discussions with Jim about a new time slot and will have more information to share soon.”

But the prospective time slot seems far from ideal, according to Oliver Darcy’s Status newsletter. Darcy was the first to report last week that CNN is considering relegating Acosta to the midnight hour. The anchor, however, is weighing exiting the network rather than taking the graveyard shift, the Los Angeles Times reported Wednesday.

Acosta declined Newsweek‘s emailed request for comment.

The shake-up at CNN is part of a larger reshuffling at the network after it laid off 6 percent of its workforce this week. But while the efforts to ramp up its digital strategies come amid a general decline in cable news viewership, it also comes at the beginning of a new Trump era.

“A couple of things are at work here,” John Pitney, a veteran political scientist and former Republican National Committee official, told Newsweek on Friday. “Bad ratings usually prompt television networks to shuffle on-air talent. And CNN’s ratings have slumped.”

But he added that “politics is also part of the picture.”

“Acosta is an aggressive interviewer, and executives might be thinking that his approach is unappealing to right-leaning viewers,” Pitney said. “And there is Trump himself. He has not been shy about threatening the economic interests of news organizations that displease him.”

Donald Trump and Jim Acosta: A Timeline

Trump and Acosta have long had a contentious relationship. Throughout his time as CNN’s chief White House correspondent, Acosta became Trump’s biggest on-air critic, often making headlines for getting into confrontations with the president.

But the friction began well before Acosta assumed that position in 2018. During a press conference as president-elect, Trump refused to take questions from Acosta, saying CNN was “fake news.”

“Your organization is terrible,” Trump shouted at the reporter during the January 2017 conference. “I am not going to give you a question. You are fake news.”

After the two sparred, Sean Spicer, who was the incoming White House press secretary at the time, threatened to throw Acosta out of the room.

Things came to a head in 2018. In the wake of the midterm elections, Acosta interrogated Trump at a press briefing about demonizing “invasion” immigrants for political points—a line of questioning that prompted the president to respond, “Honestly I think you should let me run the country and you run CNN. If you did it well, your ratings would be much better.”

When Acosta wouldn’t let up and continued to press the president, a White House aide approached him and physically tried to take the microphone away from him, leading the two to arm wrestle in a jaw-dropping altercation. After calling on another reporter, Trump turned back to Acosta to blast him as “a rude, terrible person.”

As a result of that confrontation, the Trump administration banned Acosta from the White House, revoking his press pass for what it characterized as “placing his hands on a young woman just trying to do her job.”

That move led to CNN filing a lawsuit against the Trump administration. Shortly afterward, a federal judge ordered the White House to reinstate Acosta’s press credentials. Trump and Acosta would go on to spar again at future press conferences,

Throughout all of this, Acosta maintained his position for the remainder of the Trump presidency. After Joe Biden defeated Trump in the 2020 election, Acosta was promoted to CNN’s chief domestic correspondent and weekend anchor.

When Trump left the White House, Acosta described Trump’s departure as “a sad and pathetic sight.”

“What we saw the president build over the course of four or five years out on the campaign trail and over at the White House just sort of unraveled at the end,” Acosta said on CNN in January 2021.

But this past November, the tide turned. Trump was sent back to the White House. His election win wasn’t marginal; it was decisive. He won the popular vote and carried all seven swing states. He made significant gains among Black and Latino voters. He was no longer a pariah in American culture. In fact, a number of athletes, musicians and C-suite executives were all ready to embrace him in a way that had not been seen before in his political career.

Is CNN ‘Bending the Knee’?

But experts warn that taking Acosta off the air could hurt CNN’s image, not just with its audience but also in the grander scheme of things.

“If they are shifting journalists’ time slots or editorial independence to curry favor, they’re not only hurting their culture but their reputation as a media organization,” James Haggerty, a crisis communications expert and president of PRCG Haggerty, told Newsweek. “And at the end of the day, that reputation for integrity and independence is the product they are selling.”

Doug Gordon, a Democratic strategist and co-CEO of UpShift Strategies, agreed that taking Acosta out of the lineup could backfire on CNN. He told Newsweek such a move could deal a blow to its reputation in the journalism industry. And it might not just harm the network in the immediate aftermath but for years to come.

“Rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic won’t save CNN. But bending the knee to the powerful instead of holding them accountable is a permanent stain on CNN’s legacy,” Gordon said. “CNN employs lots of smart and qualified journalists. But it is clear leadership is more interested in appeasing Trump than letting those journalists do their jobs. So much for reporting without fear of favor.”

Several anti-Trump voices have already lashed out at CNN over the news that Acosta’s program had been put into limbo. Former GOP Representative Joe Walsh said on X (formerly Twitter) that while he often appeared on the network and recognized that speaking out could jeopardize future opportunities to appear on the air, “removing @Acosta from his morning show – is cowardly bull****.”

While initially a strong supporter of Trump, Walsh became increasingly critical of the president during the first Trump term, and in 2020 he launched a primary challenge to Trump’s presidential bid.

“Acosta is one of your most independent, unafraid hosts,” Walsh said Thursday. “To demote him to f***ing appease the crybaby in the White House is pathetic. And an abdication of your duty to hold ALL public officials to account. Shame on you CNN. Correct this mistake now.”

Responding on X, legal analyst Julius Kim commended Walsh’s take, adding that he hasn’t watched CNN since Election Day and that he was fine with never appearing on the network again.

“I’ve lost a lot of respect for them,” Kim said.

Fred Guttenberg, a prominent gun control activist who lost his daughter in the 2018 Parkland, Florida, school shooting, tweeted Thursday that he would never watch CNN or do an interview with the network again because of the decision to remove Acosta from the 10 a.m. time slot.

He blasted the news as an “effort to submit to Trump” and said there were other cable options for him to tune in to if he wanted to “watch real news and not Trump propaganda.”

Former Trump attorney and fixer Michael Cohen also joined Guttenberg in his “sentiment and disgust” with CNN and the network’s treatment of Acosta, while using the “#Bend the Knee” hashtag. Meanwhile, Jon Cooper, a prominent Democrat, called Acosta “one of the few remaining anchors on @CNN with real integrity” and argued that the network’s recent shift on Trump was the reason its viewership was declining.

“Removing him from his morning show to appease the Orange Fascist is a sign of weakness and cowardice on the network’s part. That’s why CNN’s viewership has declined dramatically, and will continue to do so,” Cooper wrote on X.

Looking Back: Notable Questions Acosta Asked Trump

• January 2017: “Since you’re attacking our news organization, can you give us a chance?”
• February 2017: “Aren’t you concerned, sir, that you are undermining the people’s faith in the First Amendment, freedom of the press, the press in this country when you call stories you don’t like ‘fake news’? Why not just say it’s a story I don’t like?”
• January 2018: “Just Caucasian or white countries, sir? Or do you want people to come from other parts of the world?”
• February 2018: “Mr. President, why does this keep happening to America? Will you do something about guns?””
• June 2018: “Mr. President, will you stop calling us the enemy of the people, sir?”
• October 2018: “Mr. President, one more thing on the caravan. You had said that there were Middle Easterners in the caravan. Can you explain that? Are you saying there are terrorists?”
• October 2018: “There is concern that you are sending coded language or a dog whistle to some Americans out there that what you really mean is that you are a white nationalist.”
• November 2018: “Do you think that you demonize immigrants?”
• February 2020: “Mr. President, I think our record on delivering the truth is a lot better than yours sometimes, if you don’t mind me saying.”
• March 2020: “What do you say to Americans who say you downplayed the virus over the last couple of months?”
• March 2020: “This may be an uncomfortable question, but what would the models have looked like that Dr. Birx and Dr. Fauci showed us if we had started the social distancing guidelines sooner in February or January when China, South Korea were doing those…. In terms of what information we’re getting from them but if had started this practice sooner, could these models be different?”
• March 2020: “What do you say to Americans who are upset with you over the way you downplayed this crisis over the last couple of months?”
• April 2020: “And where is Dr. Fauci?”
• April 2020: “Mr. President, you have you have said nobody could have seen this pandemic coming, but, in fact, Secretary Azar, at a biodefense summit in April of 2019, said, ‘Of course, the people—of course, the thing that people ask, “What keeps you most up at night in the biodefense world?” Pandemic flu, of course. I think everyone in this room probably shares that concern.’ Your own health and human services secretary was aware that this had the potential of being a very big problem around the world, a pandemic of this nature. Who dropped the ball?”
• May 2020: “Are you saying mission accomplished [on the COVID pandemic]?”
• August 2020: “Can you explain why so many of the public health experts on the coronavirus task force are contradicting you on things like why the virus is so widespread in this country?… Why are so many of these people on your task force contradicting you?”