Jim Acosta, the widely despised journalist, resigned from CNN this week and followed in the footsteps of another obnoxious journalist, former Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin, by launching a new website on Substack to defend democracy or whatever. He posted the first episode of the Jim Acosta Show on Tuesday, which we watched in its entirety to spare our readers the indignity. It was even worse than we expected.
After struggling through some technical difficulties and charmless banter with his guest, former CNN analyst Norm Eisen, who cofounded the Contrarian with Rubin earlier this month, Acosta found his smug, self-righteous groove by ranting about "truth" and pretending to be thrilled about his emancipation from the "perfectly lighted studios" at CNN. "We can bro out, I guess, or something like that," he told Eisen, who predicted that Acosta's resignation would be a "signal moment" in the history of the second Trump administration, and asked how journalists could find the courage to tell the truth "in a time of rising autocracy."
Acosta, who is somehow even less charismatic than Hillary Clinton, responded by quoting "the great Christiane Amanpour," who once said, "'Don't be neutral, be truthful." He went on to complain about all the "unAmerican" things Trump has already done since taking office. "That is not America," he said. "And, you know, I think it's well within our rights as journalists to call that out. I know what America is. I know what it's about, and so I can say that." He promised to "tell people the truth even when it hurts" because "that is what a true newsman, newswoman, newsperson does."
Eisen thanked Acosta for his "courage," and said the whole team at the Contrarian considered him "first and foremost among the friends of our project," which recently announced Paul Krugman, the obnoxious former New York Times columnist, as a contributor alongside "humor" writer Andy Borowitz, author of the hilarious satirical post, "Inauguration to be Held Inside Cybertruck."