Sanders threatens CNN's Jim Acosta
- Dec 12, 2017
- 3 min read
CNN star Jim Acosta has came front about an incident involving his liberty to ask the President questions at a 'press spray', an event as reporters and journalists throw questions towards Trump as he conducts a public event. He usually doesn't, but the President occasionally does respond to imminent questions from the reporters.
Jim Acosta, along with most other reporters, were prepared to throw questions at the President and maybe other officials at the scene of today's bill signing event when the White House Press Secretary, Sarah Sanders, pulled Jim Acosta aside independently and told him he might not be invited into the 'press spray' events in the future if he asked the President questions (specifically about recent breaking events).
Acosta didn't take the news so enormously, though mentioned it when talking on CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer's show and managed to take the entire internet by shock. Major news corporations took the story as 'Breaking News' - yet the latest attack on the press by White House officials; only days after a clash between Acosta and Sanders.
During a White House press briefing Sarah Sanders attacked CNN and ABC citing the false reporting that has since been closely corrected and apologized for. In fact, ABC's false report made headlines as the company chose to temporarily suspend the anchor that 'took too long', according to Conservatives, to correct the incident.
Sanders cited the ABC story when Acosta counter-attacked Sanders, asking her if she even has any story she's able to cite as 'fake news' that was aimed to directly misinform the American population in order to intentionally degrade someone. In most people's opinions, 'fake news' doesn't qualify as a description of a news anchor's mistake which is usually inevitable to happen with millions of people watching.
CNN has recently gotten much more strict on their reporting after a development lead by Conservatives concluded one of the company's long-running stories had been proven wrong. The company apologized for the mistake, saying the researchers didn't do their job correctly and misled the American people. 3 employees were fired.
Meanwhile ABC suspended one of their hosts for 4 weeks after the misleading statement that hadn't been corrected for quite a few hours, even as other major news corporations had promoted the facts behind the first-hand report.
Fox News was also proven to have promoted a misleading statement of an accusation against MSNBC citing they intentionally avoided one of the top stories at the time; an incident at the US-Mexico border that made headlines as Trump used it as an excuse for his border wall. MSNBC viewers counter-attacked with proven fact and photo evidence of MSNBC hosts covering the topic throughout the weekend Fox accused them of ignoring the story for political reasons.
Since then, Fox News has not come out to call their mistake out by name and intentionally disregarded the small frame of their misleading statement as a 'simple mistake that isn't worth apologizing for', kind of similar to CNN's recent mistake which concluded a noticed time frame difference in one of their stories.
Sarah Sanders has been encouraging Donald Trump's war on the mainstream left-leaning media for months, but it's getting annoying for many reporters in the White House press pool. In fact threatening a reporter, saying he'd be refused to do his job correctly if he asks a question - which he is permitted to do - is seen as an attack.
Although Jim Acosta did mention that either way the press simply does not respond to threats made by the White House officials. They continue to stand up to the high-rank officials, including Trump. In response to Sanders' threats, Acosta threw his questions toward the President anyway - saying that he had full right to do so.
One of the only ways to combat Sarah Sanders' clear ambushes on the US free press, including her forceful terminations of question lines she doesn't agree with and forceful hushing of reporters when they ask questions, would be to protest the WH press pool altogether. But this does cause problems; considering Fox News and other right-wing news agencies are unlikely to join CNN, ABC, the NYT, and others which would give them advantanges to get news stories quicker.
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