What is Jim Acosta doing?? | Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is already breaking the rules
Jim Acosta is on a crusade, but it's unclear what it's about.
The vaguely George Clooney-esque White House reporter for CNN has been causing a huge ruckus in Washington with his clashes with the Trump administration. After refusing to give up his microphone during a Trump press conference in which he badgered the president, Acosta’s permanent press credentials were revoked — and now he and CNN are suing the White House.
The White House’s argument for revoking his credentials was nonsense. It claimed that Acosta lost his pass for “placing his hands” on the intern who tried to grab his mic, and to make the case it released a video doctored by an unhinged British conspiracy theorist. Acosta did lightly touch the intern, but it wasn’t any kind of assault, as the White House has implied. Fortunately CNN, which is suing both on First and Fifth amendment (due process) grounds, has a strong legal case for getting Acosta’s credentials back.
It should go without saying that if Trump can’t stand Acosta, he’d be better off calling on him less frequently instead of trying to kick him out of the White House press corps based on a lie. But, assuming Acosta gets his credentials back, he should really take this moment to reflect on what he’s been doing lately and if he wants to keep doing it. Because I don’t get it.
For years, Acosta has has locked horns with Trump and his press secretaries over their mendacity and their attacks on the press. But Acosta doesn’t just ask his questions. He explicitly frames them as a “challenge.” He speaks theatrically about the spirit of American democracy. He talks over and cuts off his interlocutors. He refuses to ask one question, taking away time from other reporters with follow-ups that yield no meaningful answers. He demands that the administration take back its criticism of the press. Once, in a move that made him resemble a member of Code Pink more than a reporter, he shouted at the president from the back of the crowd at a tax anniversary event, causing audience members to shush him! In short, Acosta has sought to be a nuisance.
I struggle to understand his endgame here. Is he hoping that his stunts will get the administration to finally acknowledge that it lies? To apologize for lying? To even stop lying? Because nobody with a shred common sense would think that’s possible. Deception is a key political strategy of the Trump administration, and it’s carried out with pride, not regret.
Of course Acosta and all reporters should use questions and follow-up questions to point out falsehoods and place pressure on the Trump administration in a bid for accountability. But Acosta is trying to go one step further than that, seemingly believing that if he vexes the administration enough they might break down and make a concession.
That tactic is not only failing — it is clearly backfiring. It neatly plays into Trump’s narrative that the media harbors a grudge against him and is uninterested in treating him fairly. Trump has license to say that CNN reporters never spoke to Obama the way they speak to him. And the optics are terrible. If I think Acosta looks kind of annoying during press briefings, then there’s no doubt that Trump’s supporters, who are already primed to believe anything the president says, will see his antics as evidence of unforgivable anti-Trump bias in the press. There’s a reason that Trump press staffers give each other high fives after they walk away from the podium after sparring with Acosta.
I share Acosta’s rage. But if he’s decided that Trump’s propaganda operation deserves more than questioning he’s better off pursuing that goal outside of the White House press corps. He’s chosen to work in a sector of media that relies on politesse and deference to acquire information, and he’s running into the limits of that. I wouldn’t want to deal with that either, which is why I wouldn’t want to work as a White House correspondent. Acosta should take on a position that involves more overt analysis and opinion, or investigative work, or leave the media and become an activist. Right now he he’s hurting his own cause, and the story has moved away from Trump’s falsehoods and toward the melodrama of Trump vs CNN.
And maybe that’s the point. A Politico Magazine article reports that the higher-ups at CNN seem to love the skirmishes, which is why Acosta has gotten the green light to keep doing it. “There is also a view inside the network’s newsroom that Acosta has been given the latitude, perhaps even the implicit assignment, to turn the briefing room into a personal editorial page because it is good television and reaffirms CNN’s integral role in the ongoing drama,” the article says. That's shocking, but not surprising, for an outlet that confessed to giving Trump massively disproportionate airtime in the run-up to the 2016 election because it was so watchable.
In this reading, CNN is in some ways of the same ilk as Trump: prioritizing ratings over pursuit of truth.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is already breaking the rules
Here's an excerpt from an article I wrote for Vice this week:
Ever since Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the fiery Democratic Socialist from the Bronx, toppled the ten-term incumbent in her New York district, analysts have wondered whether she can be as much of a renegade in Washington as she was on the campaign trail.
So far, all signs suggest she will be. In the mere week since Ocasio-Cortez was elected to office, she has made splashes in the news with confessions about her financial struggle to secure an apartment in Washington, her sharp criticism of Amazon’s plan to open a new headquarters near her district, and her audacious decision to join green activists at a sit-in at House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi’s office.
Many freshmen members of Congress stay relatively quiet; they have little power compared to their more senior colleagues. But Ocasio-Cortez, who has attracted a huge amount of media attention, has chosen to break from Democratic establishment norms right out of the gate, keen on harnessing the movement energy that drove her into office. Yet she’s not just a House-side version of Senator Bernie Sanders, the most prominent democratic socialist in America. Instead, she appears to be forging her own path, embracing a raw political persona that celebrates diversity and youth. In other words, she’s not only pushing Congress to the left—she’s also changing the way its left flank looks and operates.
Ocasio-Cortez’s victory on Election Day last week was no shocker; her solidly Democratic district was never going to vote for a Republican. But the next day, she made news for something else, revealing to the New York Times that she was strapped for cash. “I have three months without a salary before I’m a member of Congress. So, how do I get an apartment? Those little things are very real,” she told the Times. Ocasio-Cortez, who started her campaign for Congress while working as a waitress in Manhattan, she’s using savings to scrape by and “hoping that gets me to January.”
Ocasio-Cortez’s comments blew up on social media, where the right chided her for being financially irresponsible and a Fox News panel chuckled at her housing predicament. But many on the left found her candor to be relatable and refreshing. The episode shone a light on the massive affordable housing crisis plaguing metropolitan areas across the nation. It also positioned her as somebody particularly motivated to tackle that issue compared to many of her peers in Congress, whose median net worth is over $1 million.
The housing comments were just another case of Ocasio-Cortez deftly turning the personal into the political, a skill that many older politicians utterly lack. She has used her Instagram account to field policy questions from followers while preparing a pot of ramen at home, showcase the racially diverse squad of left-wing freshmen congresswomen that she’s become the de facto leader of, and openly discuss the unique fear and anxieties that she experiences as young a Latina at the forefront a growing social movement. Ocasio-Cortez’s unusual candor about her personal experience allows her to come across as an everywoman—and also to assert pride in her identity as somebody who is breaking into spaces that haven’t historically included people like her.
Read the rest of the article over at Vice!
What I'm reading
Amazon’s HQ2 spectacle isn’t just shameful— it should be illegal.
Architecture, aesthetic moralism, and the crisis of urban housing.
The midterms have given the Democratic Party a boost. But their professional-class politics are a cul de sac.
Jamilah King dives into her family's connection to Peoples Temple, perhaps the most influential political institution in San Francisco in the 1970s.
The secret history of violence among American lawmakers in the 19th century.
Xi Jinping rewrites history in his own image.
Long reads
The Times' blockbuster investigation of Facebook, which The Atlantic's Adam Serwer described thusly: Facebook decided to defend themselves by spreading anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, and then accusing its critics of being anti-Semitic. Difficult to top that combination of evil and cynicism."
Adrien Chen on the algorithmic future of work: "Drawing on four years of ethnographic research among Uber drivers, Rosenblat has produced a thoroughly dystopian report that details how millions of drivers are now managed by a computerized system that combines the hard authoritarianism of Frederick Winslow Taylor with the cynical cheerleading of Michael Scott."
Everyone believed Larry Nassar. "The story of Larry Nassar is not a story of silence. The story of Larry Nassar is that of an edifice of trust so resilient, so impermeable to common sense, that it endured for decades against the allegations of so many women."
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