The Mainstream Press Vows to Protect Jim Acosta at All (Some) Costs
In a stunning development of the vicious (and now legal!) ideological battle over whether or not Jim Acosta should get his White House press pass back, CNN has picked up a bunch of allies, including one very unlikely one: Fox News, the place where Trump can get all of the latest news about white genocide and what a great guy he is.
Fox News President Jay Wallace, in a statement that Fox News could have put on Twitter if it wasn’t on a tweet-strike right now, announced today that the network intended to file an amicus brief in support of CNN’s lawsuit on behalf of White House correspondent Jim Acosta, who was stripped of his press pass during a bizarre incident involving a verbal confrontation with the president and an extremely tame, non-violent interaction with an intern over who got to hold the microphone.
NBC News quickly hopped on the amicus brief, and as of this afternoon, at least 13 major news organizations had also announced that they intended to join the brief.
CNN’s lawsuit claims that revoking Acosta’s “hard pass” to the White House “violates CNN and Acosta’s First Amendment rights of freedom of the press, and their Fifth Amendment rights to due process.”
The White House’s filing disputing CNN’s claims and plea for a restraining order (which would give Acosta his pass back) placed justification for the decision solely on the weird microphone incident, claiming that Acosta was banned for “disrupting press proceedings,” and not that he was banned for asking hard questions.
This rare occurrence of media solidarity indicates pretty much everyone else in the mainstream White House Press Corps stands behind Acosta. Whether they’ll take action beyond this, however, remains to be seen.