The Trump administration’s new “Media Offender of the Week” website has “cracked the code on how to hurt the press in this country,” Jim Acosta told Charles F. Coleman, Jr. on MS NOW’s “Velshi” Saturday, adding that the administration is essentially trying to “feed red meat to the base.”
Trump announced the new website Friday. The page currently accuses CBS News, along with The Boston Globe and The Independent of misrepresenting Trump’s response to Sen. Mark Kelly telling service members they can refuse illegal orders.
“The media misrepresented President Trump’s call for Members of Congress to be held accountable for inciting sedition by saying that he called for their ‘execution,’” the site stated.
“I think Donald Trump has cracked the code on how to hurt the press in this country with these lawsuits that have been settled,” the former CNN anchor said on MS NOW. “It’s done terrible damage to the industry, I think, by and large when he puts that kind of stuff up on the White House website.”
“What they’re basically trying to do is just sort of feed red meat to the base,” he continued. “If you look at his poll numbers, he is down in what the mid-30s right now according to the latest public approval polls.”
He added: “The rest of the country has sort of written him off. And the other thing that I think he does when he’s lashing out in this fashion, I will say I think it’s gotten worse. This is worse than what I saw during the first administration in terms of the way he’s ramping up these attacks. And it may have something to do with just a state of decline on his part. It seems to me to be kind of a symptom of the cognitive decline.”
The solution to this website and Trump’s frequent habit of attacking the press and specifically targeting female reporters is “collective action,” Acosta said.
“Imagine, you know, the boss in your office talking to a female reporter in that way,” he said of Trump’s continued verbal assaults on female journalists. “It wouldn’t be tolerated, [and] that boss would be fired at any company.”
“Imagine if this were your daughter or your sister or your mother being spoken to in this fashion,” Acosta added. “That’s why, you know, I strongly believe, and there are people who disagree with me on this, that other folks in the press in the room should speak up in that moment and say, ‘Mr. President, that is not appropriate.’”
“I think the only solution to all of this is collective action,” he continued. “We need to see the networks get together, perhaps with some of the major newspapers, [and] send a letter to the White House, send it to Karoline Leavitt and say, ‘Listen, if the president does not stop these attacks, we’re not coming into your Oval Office sprays, we’re not going to ride with you on Air Force One, you can have Fox and all these other sycophantic outlets covering you, but we’re just not going to do it.”
Watch the full interview with Jim Acosta and April Ryan in the video above.
