If Jim Acosta has anything complimentary to say about former President Donald Trump, it was not shared during his recent Open Visions Forum lecture on Fairfield University”™s virtual platform.
Acosta, who served as CNN”™s senior White House correspondent during the Obama and Trump administrations, offered a harsh recollection of his time covering Trump in the newly published autobiography “The Enemy of the People: A Dangerous Time to Tell the Truth.”
In his Fairfield University presentation, Acosta declared he has been “very worried about the kind of country that we’re leaving to our children and our grandchildren,” pointing to Trump”™s adversarial relationship with the press corps during the 2016 campaign as a turning point in attempts to weaken the media industry”™s role within the wider U.S. society.
“We would go into these big packed audiences, in arenas with thousands of people,” he recalled. “Trump, because he didn’t like the coverage that he got from the press, he would refer to us as the dishonest news media, the disgusting news media ”” he would call us liars and scum and thieves and so on. He hadn’t called us fake news yet.”
For Acosta, the more troublesome aspect of Trump”™s verbiage was the reaction that his rally audiences generated.
“You would have thousands of people chanting, ”˜CNN sucks,”™” he continued. “People saying that we were traitors to the country.”
While Acosta acknowledged Trump was not the first president with a poor opinion of the media ”” Richard Nixon had multiple journalists on an enemies list ”” his eventual branding of the press corps as “fake news” changed the dynamics of covering the White House.
“He put a target on our backs,” Acosta said, noting that Trump singled out CNN by tweeting memes where figures wearing the CNN logo as a head were subject to cartoonish violence.
“Those fairly harmless-sounding memes sort of escalated and we were viewing threats and other acts of intimidation that were directed at us,” he stated. “I would routinely see on my social media feeds all sorts of violent and threatening comments, and it was just building up and escalating over time.”
Acosta admitted that polls have repeatedly shown that public distrust of the media ”” he joked that “I think we’re still above Congress in terms of approval ratings” ”” is tied directly to “our profession demonized by the President of United States.”
He also accused Trump”™s loose acquaintance with facts ”” he cited how “the Washington Post fact-checkers found that he had lied or told half-truths in a range of 20,000 times over the course of his presidency” ”” resulted in a toxic situation that created public safety issues.
“We shouldn’t be surprised at all that people don’t trust that vaccines are safe or don’t trust the election results from the 2020 campaign and so on,” Acosta said.
He pointed out that regions of the country where Covid-related death rates are highest occur where “people have decided to pick and choose what they think is real, what they view as a credible news,” which he identified as Fox News and conservative news sites.
“Right now, we’re dealing with a very serious crisis in this country when it comes to how people receive information,” Acosta said. “The information spectrum has been so segmented that people can crawl into these disinformation pods.”
Acosta also added some humor to his presentation, confiding that the White House”™s press briefing section “could really use an extreme makeover” while adding “it smells like damp feet.”
He cited a personal favorite moment of his work when he questioned Cuban President Raul Castro during President Obama”™s 2016 trip to Havana about his country”™s policy toward political prisoners.
“He had the translator headphones on and he was so upset by the question that he took the headphones off,” said Acosta, who added that he identified himself to Castro as the son of a Cuban refugee.
“When I got back to the United States from that trip, my dad ”” who’s still alive ”” was beaming,” he said. “Just grinning from ear to ear, and he had all the press clippings from that exchange that I had with Raul Castro. That is probably the most satisfying moment that I’ve ever had in my career.”
With Trump”™s departure from the White House, Acosta moved on to become CNN”™s chief domestic correspondent; he said he had no regrets over leaving his previous assignment.
“The day I left the White House, I described it as ”˜The Shawshank Redemption”™ ”” it was like the rain was coming down from the heavens and I had just gotten out,” he said. “For me, eight years was enough there to make my mark.”
