NY Press Club Throws Standards Out the Window with Laughable Honor for Jim Acosta
We haven’t heard from CNN White House correspondent/anthropomorphic hot air balloon Jim Acosta recently, which is good for America and bad for Jim Acosta. After all, there’s nothing that the reincarnation of Ted Baxter likes less than not having his name out there.
Well, thank the folks at the New York Press Club. They apparently don’t think that the most well-coiffed self-aggrandizer in the James S. Brady Press Briefing Room is a walking joke. Instead, he’s an exemplar of speaking truth to power — and that’s why he’s getting the “Truth to Power” award from the organization.
“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, ” Press Club President Jane Tillman Irving said in a media release, according to The Wrap.
“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.”
Pressman, for those of you unfamiliar with New York journalism, was a longtime fixture on WNBC-TV. Say what you will about his leanings, he was the opposite of a self-aggrandizer.
Also, Pressman once notably quipped (borrowing a line of thinking from Mark Twain), “Why spoil a good story with the facts?” Which should be engraved on Acosta’s plaque for this award.
The award is supposed to honor “an individual whose body of work challenges the power establishment and/or defends journalists.” Yet even The Wrap concedes that Acosta was somewhat of an unknown before he started verbally sparring with the president and other White House press secretaries.
“Acosta, the channel’s chief White House correspondent, spent years in relative obscurity on CNN until Donald Trump’s victory in the 2016 presidential election. Trump has made CNN the primary target of his attacks on the media and has disparaged the network as ‘fake news,'” The Wrap noted.
Well, now we know who he is, thanks to frequent run-ins with the administration. In fact, he got his press pass pulled at one point after he refused to give up the microphone and engaged in a minor-league physical confrontation with a White House intern; CNN managed to get it back by going to court and apparently proving we all have some sort of legal right to a press pass.
“People have to behave,” Trump said in the wake of the ruling, saying that if reporters like Acosta “don’t listen to the rules and regulations, we will end up back in court and we will win.”
“We had a lot of reporters in that room, many many reporters in that room and they were unable to ask questions because this guy gets up and starts, you know, doing what he’s supposed to be doing for him and for CNN and, you know, just shouting out questions and making statements too,” Trump said in an interview with Fox News.
Whether Acosta should have had his press pass revoked isn’t the issue here. How is this the behavior of “an individual whose body of work challenges the power establishment and/or defends journalists?”
In terms of defending the rights to have a press pass, that was CNN’s lawyers. If you want, give them the award.
Acosta earned this by asking questions — and if you can remember what those questions were without googling them, congratulations, you’ve got a better memory than I do — and working himself into a snit when someone tried to take the microphone away from him.
If you’re familiar with Gabe Pressman, is this the way you think the man’s legacy and reputation deserves to be honored? And if you aren’t familiar, I’d urge you to go on YouTube and look up some clips. Yes, he was a First Amendment crusader, but he did so with a profound sense of dignity.
Meanwhile, here’s Jim Acosta having a hissy fit when someone asked him for credentials because they didn’t recognize who he is:
I’m glad the memory of Gabe Pressman is being honored with an award given to a self-aggrandizer not above pulling a “don’t you know who I am?” routine. I’m glad, too, that it’s someone whose belief system seems to be exactly the same as every other person in the press corps.
One can only hope, if the Press Club is willing to throw their standards out the window like this, they can at least show the video where Acosta inadvertently proves that border walls work at the ceremony. I know that’s unlikely, but a man can always dream. Why spoil a good award with the facts, after all?
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