Daily Beast editor-in-chief John Avlon is a regular guest on CNN's Reliable Sources (as he was on Sunday), so it shouldn't be the slightest bit surprising that the Daily Beast is rushing to provide aid and comfort to CNN's "courageous" screamer in the White House briefing room.
The latest article by Lloyd Grove is headlined in tabloid style [Image via Daily Beast]:
CNN’s Jim Acosta: The Trump Trolls Who Want Me Dead
CNN’s Jim Acosta is not just abused by the president and his staff for his reporting, but also by Trump’s most abusive fans online. He says it won’t stop him doing his ‘damn job.’
Acosta is "abused," he's not the abuser. He's "reporting," not editorializing. That's bad enough. But Grove began with the Fakest of News -- Acosta claiming that his showboating routine is oh-so-uncomfortable for him to uncork:
After all the insults, acrimonious exchanges, accusations of grandstanding, attacks by Fox News personalities, and even occasional death threats from Donald Trump-loving trolls, Jim Acosta is just flesh and blood.
“Not everybody is comfortable taking this guy on,” CNN’s chief White House correspondent told The Daily Beast on Thursday—“this guy” meaning the president of the United States. “It’s uncomfortable. It makes me uncomfortable.”
Acosta says he's only imitating his hero Sam Donaldson, so Grove went and found Donaldson to come to Acosta's defense:
With his confrontational style, Acosta sees himself as honoring the tradition of the legendarily loud-mouthed ABC News White House correspondent Sam Donaldson, the scourge of the Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan White Houses.
Donaldson, a virtuoso in the performance art of television news, frequently teased headline-making answers from his shouted questions at the president.
The 84-year-old Donaldson, now retired, returns the favor. “I think he’s as good as it gets,” he told The Daily Beast about Acosta. “And when I say that, I’m not damning with faint praise. He’s good.”
...“People who stick their head above the crowd get hit by rotten fruit,” Donaldson said, quoting an old adage. “Jim sticks his head above the crowd. But if you look at what he’s doing, the questions he’s asking, the questions he’s pushing back on, his refusal to accept a bunch of hooey, yes, in a way that is grandstanding. But thank goodness he’s doing it.”
Grove provides the usual liberal line from Acosta, that people are "eventually going to get weary of this reality TV-style president," to which we would tell Grove: People have gotten weary of Acosta, who also acts like a reality-TV star, the diva who everyone roots against. This is why the Daily Beast is highlighting Acosta's trolls, and not noting that Trump and plenty of conservatives also receive nasty threats:
“I receive more threats than I could count; it’s almost every week,” said Acosta, a soon-to-be-divorced father of two—mentioning one social media denizen who reacted to a recent Instagram photo of the CNN correspondent on a ski vacation by wishing that he’d race into a tree and kill himself; and a second troll who hoped he’d get cancer.
“I don’t think we should go too deeply into it,” Acosta added. “The company is aware, and they’ve urged me to take precautions.”
