WHCA President Swats Jim Acosta’s Clownish Press Room Antics

In a new book, “Front Row at the Trump Show,” White House Correspondents’ Association president Jonathan Karl takes a few swats at CNN’s clownish press room representative, Jim Acosta. While Karl, who works for ABC News as a White House correspondent himself, doesn’t disguise his antipathy for President Trump, he says in the book that Acosta has done the American political media no favors with his constant showboating.

Karl criticized Acosta for acting like an “opinion journalist” who, instead of defending the integrity of the media with responsible reporting and insightful questions, has instead “played right into the explicit Trump strategy of portraying the press as the opposition party.” In an interview with the Washington Free Beacon this week, Karl said that Acosta was one of several reporters who somehow lost their objectivity when Donald Trump took office.

“A sub-sub theme [of the book] is those of us reporters make a mistake if they appear to be too much like an opposition to the president or the resistance,” Karl told the Free Beacon. “That’s not our job. We’re not the opposition party. We’re supposed to report and report aggressively on the president, on any president, but not to go over the top.”

Karl said something similar in an interview with The Daily Beast: “Regarding Jim Acosta, to paraphrase Voltaire, I will defend to the death his right to report from the White House, but I have some issues with the style in which he has done so. We can be tough, we can call out things that are not true, we can be aggressive in our questioning, but I don’t think we should act like we are part of the resistance.”

Karl’s criticism of Acosta will undoubtedly be brushed aside by CNN and their chief White House correspondent; God knows, if he was going to “get it,” he would have gotten it by now. Whenever Acosta finds himself in a position to start arguing with Trump or his press secretaries, he leaps at the opportunity like a frog into water. Reporting on the president has become a WWE side show for Acosta and CNN, and he so clearly relishes playing the heel to Trump’s champion. Or maybe Acosta thinks HE is the good guy? We suppose we’ve seen worse cases of delusion.

Indeed, see the title of Acosta’s recent book. “The Enemy of the People: A Dangerous Time to Tell the Truth in America.”

Right, dude. How exactly would you know?