On Friday, The New York Press Club announced the recipient of their “Truth to Power” award: CNN White House correspondent Jim Acosta. The award honors “an individual whose body of work challenges the power establishment and/or defends journalists,” as The Wrap reported.
In the press release accompanying the announcement, Jane Tillman Irving, president of the Press Club, stated, “We are proud to honor a man such as Jim Acosta, who has proven himself throughout his storied, decades-long career to be a journalist of the utmost integrity. For his unwavering commitment to fact and journalism, we are pleased to add to Jim’s many accolades with the Gabe Pressman ‘Truth to Power’ award.” CNN promoted Acosta to chief White House correspondent in January 2018.
Acosta has relished his role in trumpeting his antagonism to President Trump for at least the last year-and-a-half; in June 2017, he tweeted, “Does this feel like America? Where the White House takes q’s from conservatives, then openly trashes the news media in the briefing room.”
After Acosta badgered presidential adviser Stephen Miller when Miller was outlining the key elements of Sens. Tom Cotton (R-AR) and David Perdue’s (R-GA) immigration bill, called the RAISE Act, author David Limbaugh wrote, “Acosta was particularly hostile and rude, making pointed statements masked as questions, refusing to allow Miller the courtesy of responding and repeatedly interrupting him. It was as if Acosta imagined himself on the CNN debate show ‘Crossfire,’ forgot to do his homework and assumed he would be declared the winner if he monopolized the exchange with rudeness, arrogance, volume and ignorance.”
In January 2018, The Daily Wire listed Acosta’s five worst moments with the White House, including melting down when White Press Secretary Sean Spicer wouldn’t turn the cameras on, blasting what he called President Trump’s “Fake News” press conference by using fake news himself, chastising Trump for not revealing publicly how many troops the U.S. had deployed, and getting embarrassed by White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders not once, but twice.
Other noteworthy moments from Acosta: throwing a hissy fit when Secret Service Agents asked to see his media credentials in May 2018; yelling at Trump during a White House tax bill event in June 2018; “fact-checking” Trump only to get “fact-checked” himself in October 2018; infamously having his mic taken away after he would not stop asking questions, thus preventing others from doing so; having his “hard pass” taken away by the Secret Service; reportedly having other CNN reporters say privately, “This isn’t the Jim F*ing Acosta Show. We all hate him. He’s an asshole and he actually is disrespectful to the president”; getting slammed indirectly by CBS News’ Major Garrett for his obnoxious behavior, and finally, unsurprisingly, revealing that he was writing his own book about the Trump administration and its battles with the news media.
Most recently, Acosta complained in March after he was not called on by Trump during a press conference with Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, adding, “The president has, you know, a gazillion Twitter followers. He has a massive presence on Instagram, has a massive presence on Fakebook — Facebook. So do lots of other conservative figures here in the U.S. and so, you know, the president — he likes to talk about how there’s this media collusion game that is stacked against him when he has one of the most powerful social media voices throughout. And so I think that just has to be said as well, it has to be put on the record that he is sort of, you know, pulling a three card monty in terms of, you know, how he’s describing the situation.”