MEDIAITE
CNN’s Jim Acosta is fond of the self-indulgent, vainglorious rant.
During the first Trump administration, Acosta suffered from the most acute delusions of grandeur since Don Quixote roamed La Mancha.
Last Thursday, he showed signs of suffering a relapse.
“Journalists exist to seek the truth, to tell people’s stories, to lift up voices that may not be heard otherwise, to shine a light on injustice and to hold the powerful accountable,” declared Acosta during a monologue. “We are not the enemy of the people. We are the defenders of the people. Walter Cronkite once said, ‘freedom of the press is not just important to democracy. It is democracy.’”
He went on to hold up a sign that a viewer had sent to him eight years ago.
“She carried it here at a march in Washington. She wrote on the back of the sign to me and the press here in D.C., ‘you have our support.’ To Nora, wherever you are, right back at you,” he continued, seemingly never more proud of himself.
Of course, nothing Acosta had to say was wrong, per se. A free, industrious, and adversarial press is integral to any well-functioning democracy. But for Acosta to say so fresh off a four year vacation during which the press failed on countless levels — and most notably in identifying that the president of the United States was no longer functioning as such — renders it something more akin to a comedy routine than an earnest expression of principle.
It should be conservative media’s aim to put Acosta to shame, not to emulate him.
Right-wing publications and TV — supplemented now by podcasts, and Substacks, and social media addicts — rose out of the recognition that mainstream media was left-wing media. The groupthink was bad when National Review announced itself in 1955, worse when Fox News came on the block in 1996, and is downright intolerable now; a 2023 Syracuse University study found that just 3.4% of American journalists are Republicans. In such an environment, conservative truth-seeking is an imperative, not a luxury, not just for the GOP’s political prospects, but for the health of the country…
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