In addition to his interview on his own network's Reliable Sources, CNN reporter Jim Acosta drew a pretty supportive profile on CBS's Sunday Morning. Substitute host Mo Rocca began: "Whether White House officials like it or not, Jim Acosta of CNN is always ready to ask the next question."
Really? Does he ask questions? Often, he just makes angry statements. Reporter Chip Reid set the scene. "The White House briefing room as battleground." Acosta told Sarah Sanders "You're saying something that's just patently untrue." Then Reid said "And often it's the press versus the president."
In the entire piece, Reid never asked whether these same battle-hungry reporters acted this way around President Obama. That would be ludicrous, but it's part of the bigger picture of the media's liberal bias.
Reid touted "Jim Acosta, chief White House correspondent for CNN, has had his fair share of heated exchanges," and noted the White House briefly revoked Acosta's press pass. "Whether he's a villain, a hero or something in between, Jim Acosta is not about to take a backseat in the briefing room." This was Reid's tough question:
REID: There are two basic criticisms of you even from some of your colleagues and certainly from the White House and one of them is that you grandstand.
[clip of Watters' World on Fox News]
DINESH D'SOUZA: I am looking at an overgrown infant.
JESSE WATTERS: He thinks he's the Rosa parks of the press corps. [end clip]
REID: -- That you sometime make the news rather than report on the news. Is that a valid criticism?
ACOSTA: Well I know folks are going to say that. I look at it as, I am doing my job and I see this as a very serious, serious moment in our nation's history, and I think to some extent we have been trying to figure out the best way to cover this president and --
REID: Do you think you found the best way to cover him, confront him?
ACOSTA: I think I found the best --
REID: Challenge him?
ACOSTA: I think I have found the best way for me.
Obama being president wasn't a threatening time, a "very serious moment" where the president had to be screamed at on TV. Reid let Acosta lob his usual argument that Trump's taunts lead to threats and potentially, violence.
REID: But his way has not only brought attention to himself. But to his network.
ACOSTA: The man who sent the pipe bombs to CNN and other democratic targets [?] in the fall of 2018, on his social media account he was directing death threats at me. Something along the lines of "you're next, you're the enemy of America," and so on. You know, my sense of it is that what started off as an act for the president calling us fake news, calling us the enemy of the people....And so on and has gotten out of control and they don't know how to reel it back in.
CBS also repeated the mangling of President Trump's "fine people on both sides" remark after the Charlottesville clashes, which led to Acosta preaching: "I think that that was a very important moment. Not just for the press but for the American people. I don't believe there are two sides to a story when it is a matter of right versus wrong. It just doesn't work that way. And I think that in this era reporters have been thrust into a position where, you know, we are not only calling balls and strikes but we are calling fouls."
Reid's story ended with Acosta complaining that Sarah Sanders is now taking questions in the driveway at the White House, and not as much in the briefing room, and defending his yelling one more time.
ACOSTA: I don't want that way of life to change for us, so yeah, it's worth fighting for. Yeah, it's worth shouting questions to make sure that they are held accountable on this sort of thing. I feel very strongly about it. I want my kids to grow up in a country where, you know, we can still shout questions at the president. he can take it. He's the president, right? He can handle it.
But could Acosta handle tough questions to hold him accountable? He wasn't really getting them on CBS.
