Jim Acosta defined
CNN under Trump. Now he’s gone ‘independent.’
The longtime anchor
signed off with a typically defiant message.
January
31, 2025 at 6:30 a.m. ESTToday at 6:30 a.m. EST
On Tuesday morning, Jim Acosta said goodbye to
his 10 a.m. CNN audience with a familiar message: “Don’t give in to the lies.
Don’t give in to the fear. Hold on to the truth and to hope. … I will not give
in to the lies. I will not give in to the fear.”
That’s a sampling of the anchor-chair defiance that CNN’s
leaders wanted to move to a time slot when much of the United States is asleep.
Prior to his departure, Acosta was offered a
two-hour show from midnight to 2 a.m. Eastern time — one hour longer than his
morning gig and airing from 9 p.m. to 11 p.m. on the West Coast. That offer was
part of a CNN schedule realignment that saw Wolf Blitzer move to a 10
a.m.-to-noon slot, in a partnership with co-host Pamela Brown, along with a
number of other adjustments.
“I think that there was an effort on both sides to make it
work,” said a knowledgeable CNN source, adding that the offer would have
enabled Acosta to dominate late-breaking news events, such as Wednesday
night’s plane crash over
the Potomac River.
Acosta turned down the offer to become CNN’s midnight guy.
President Donald Trump reveled in the goings-on in a Truth Social post, calling Acosta a “sleazebag” and mocking the proposal to
move him to the “Death Valley” of the cable news lineup. Not a great moment for
CNN.
Acosta’s decision prompted a fair bit of commentary that
he’d be a fine fit on
MSNBC. He went, instead, to an outlet with a bit more ideological diversity.
“As you could see earlier today, this was my last day at CNN, and I did want to
jump on Substack Live here for a moment and say, welcome to my new venture.
I’m going independent, at least for now.” He has already racked up 109,000
subscribers.
Planted amid a flurry of headlines from the Trump White
House, Acosta’s move was a moment unto itself, if only because it punctuated a
sharp break from how CNN approached the first Trump presidential term. It’s all
about tone: CNN reacted again and again with chyronic outrage to the first-term
initiatives and antics of Trump, with Acosta a prominent representative. He
antagonized Trump at news conferences, sparred with the president’s press
secretaries at briefings and saw his White House press pass revoked in 2018
after he refused to surrender the microphone during a Trump news conference.
CNN rallied around him and filed suit to have it reinstated.
“Thanks to everybody for their support,” Acosta tweeted at the time. “Let’s get back to work.”
Acosta forged his public news persona when CNN was under
the leadership of Jeff Zucker, a zone-flooding sort of news boss who leveraged the chaos of the Trump era for ratings
and buzz. CNN was out front as a target of Trump’s media-bashing and out front
in pushing back. In a memorable August 2018 clash, Acosta asked White House
press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders to declare that the news media assembled
in the briefing room were not the “enemy of the people,” a phrase that had been
used by Trump. She declined the invitation.
CNN has undergone a great deal of management turnover since
those contentious days and is now under the ownership of Warner Bros.
Discovery. Chairman and CEO Mark Thompson, formerly of the New York Times, runs
the organization. As reported by Oliver Darcy of Status, Thompson instructed top network talent before the
inauguration “to be forward-thinking and to avoid pre-judging Trump.” Darcy, a
former CNN reporter, also remarked in a recent podcast that the current management has fostered a “very
different CNN in tone” when it comes to coverage of Trump.
Maybe so, though it’s easy to romanticize the pugilistic
version of CNN under Zucker. Remember, for example, that CNN, amid its zeal
over the first-term Trump, attributed undue credibility to the Steele dossier,
a document claiming all sorts of Trump-Russia collusion that has fallen apart
under the scrutiny that time affords. Pressed to come clean in 2020, CNN did not. Former CNN staffer Chris
Cillizza recently posted a thread on X explaining
that he’d “screwed up” in dismissing Trump’s
pet theory that the coronavirus originated in a Chinese lab.
There’s an editorial lane for CNN as it approaches Trump’s
second term: Investigate the daylights out of Trump’s initiatives; grill his
top lieutenants in prolonged interviews; and report the results to CNN’s
audience. Meanwhile, ditch the editorial froth that piled up in the early Trump
years — a more sober approach that appears to be taking hold among CNN’s
mainstream peers as well. “The philosophy now is to cover this administration
in a tough but fair way based on reporting,” said the CNN source.
CNN on Tuesday issued a cheery press release touting
its digital performance in 2024 and healthy TV ratings in key categories. And
last week, Thompson announced layoffs as
well as a new digital strategy — fueled by a $70 million investment from its
parent company — to capture an audience that is gradually but inexorably
migrating away from linear television to everything else. That makes CNN about
the millionth company in recent decades to pair staff reductions with plans for
digital conquest. Don’t dismiss the company’s prospects, however, considering
that Thompson was a key player in
bringing about the financial recovery of the New York Times from 2012 to 2020.
Thompson’s initiatives will all collide with CNN’s peculiar
audience crisis. No matter how it positions itself vis-à-vis Trump 2.0, the
network’s public image remains rooted in its treatment of first-term Trump —
meaning conservatives would sooner pony up for the DEI Network than for CNN
subscription products. Hold on to hope, as Acosta might say.
