Former CNN anchor Jim Acosta issued his “friends in the press” a blistering rebuke Monday for having missed a “golden opportunity” to stand up to President Donald Trump, one he attributed to “cowardice.”
In a video published on his Substack, Acosta chastised journalists who attended the White House Correspondents’ Dinner on Friday, most of whom sat quietly as Trump hurled broad attacks on the media and individual journalists.
“What we saw at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner the other night was an absolute monstrosity. Donald Trump got up on stage, and he went after the free press,” Acosta said.
“He targeted individual journalists as political enemies. He celebrated the fact that the oligarchs are taking over the networks. And the people in the audience just sat there in this stunned silence.”
Among the many targets of Trump’s attacks on the press during his WHCD speech was Acosta’s former CNN colleague Kaitlan Collins. After having just won an award for Excellence in Presidential News Coverage Under Deadline Pressure, Collins was attacked by Trump for not smiling enough. Trump also said Collins shouldn’t have won the award and called her reporting “fake.”
“A depressed, distraught, despondent, whatever you want to call it, but it was not at all an adequate reaction to what he was saying,” Acosta said. “This was a golden opportunity for people in that room to stand up to a wannabe dictator and walk out of that room! And I hate to say it, but I just think that my friends in the press, they just blew it!”
Acosta continued, “The American people could see it and it crystallized what is, I think, a real problem that we have in this country right now. And that is that the legacy and corporate media in this country, it’s just broken.”
‘They Just Blew It!’ Jim Acosta Destroys Trump WHCD Rant — Rips Press Corps For Sitting There And Taking It by Jim Acosta
‘An Absolute Monstrosity!’
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