What Jim Acosta Thinks About The Future Of Journalism

CNN weekend anchor and domestic affairs correspondent Jim Acosta certainly made a name for himself in the Donald Trump era. In fact, in 2018, after trying to get a question in during a Trump press conference and attempting to hold onto the mic despite an intern trying to take it away from him, the former president called Acosta a "rude, terrible person." That incident led to Acosta attempting to go to work at the White House the next day — he was CNN's White House Correspondent at the time — only to be informed that he could not enter the building because his press pass had been suspended (via NBC). The issue was eventually resolved and Acosta got his press access back, according to The New York Times, but the incident also solidified him as a journalist who would challenge the Trump administration.

Acosta is an experienced journalist who has been covering politics for nearly 20 years after graduating from James Madison University with a degree in mass communications and a minor in political science. He began his career with local news and then became a correspondent for CBS covering the Iraq War and John Kerry's 2004 presidential campaign before eventually moving onto CNN. After spending time as White House Correspondent during both the Barack Obama and Trump presidencies, according to his CNN bio, his thoughts on the future of journalism are vast.

In 2018, Jim Acosta offered an assessment on journalism in the Trump era and where it was headed in a conversation at Brown University's Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs. Acosta discussed being a journalist in the era of "fake news" — what Trump and his supporters called news that wasn't a glowing report about the president. Actual fake news also proliferated on what some call non-mainstream outlets that publish blatantly false stories.

"There is a difference between erroneous news and fake news," Acosta said, meaning there is news that is made up and there are news outlets that inadvertently make mistakes and then correct their errors.

"My base is people that want to hear about the truth and care about the truth ... I just tell myself before doing a live shot, 'this is just the news ... this isn't brain surgery,'" he said, via the Brown Daily Herald. "We spend a lot of time and energy fact checking, which pisses off the Trump base." 

Despite Fox News being Donald Trump's preferred media outlet throughout his presidency and as of this writing, Acosta admitted that even people working at Fox News still want to see people be tough on any president.

"There's still a nucleus of people out there that still want us to be tough," he said during his talk at Brown University's Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, while adding that he'd get text messages from Fox employees quietly telling him to keep pushing for answers and transparency from the administration. He also asked that consumers of news keep an open mind when reading, but also trust major news outlets that many call "mainstream media."

"In all of the major news outlets, people are acting in good faith," he said. "[People need] to be more sophisticated readers of news ... getting news from a variety of sources [and] harvesting a good spectrum of information," (via Brown Daily Herald).