Jim Acosta Whines Trump Is 'Winning' His War on the Press

Tim Graham
Thu, 02 Apr 2026 16:33:17 -0700
Opinion

Don't look now, but FCC Chairman Brendan Carr and Jim Acosta agree on something: President Donald Trump is "winning" his effort to reshape the media landscape in his second term.

Appearing on the "Power Lines" podcast with his fellow ardent leftists Oliver Darcy and Jon Passantino, Acosta glumly proclaimed, "I don't think it takes a rocket scientist to figure out that Donald Trump is winning in his, you know, quest to reshape the media in this country that he's cracked the code on how to hurt the press in the U.S."

Acosta recently testified at a Democrat pseudo-hearing before Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), warning about how Larry and David Ellison had taken over CBS and are now planning to acquire CNN. He accused Trump of committing "an assault on our freedom of speech ... taking us down the road of Putin and China to state-controlled media." Darcy and Acosta both constantly paint the Ellisons as creating "MAGA-coded" media.
Updated: Fri Apr 03, 2026

Don't look now, but FCC Chairman Brendan Carr and Jim Acosta agree on something: President Donald Trump is "winning" his effort to reshape the media landscape in his second term.

Appearing on the "Power Lines" podcast with his fellow ardent leftists Oliver Darcy and Jon Passantino, Acosta glumly proclaimed, "I don't think it takes a rocket scientist to figure out that Donald Trump is winning in his, you know, quest to reshape the media in this country that he's cracked the code on how to hurt the press in the U.S."

Acosta recently testified at a Democrat pseudo-hearing before Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), warning about how Larry and David Ellison had taken over CBS and are now planning to acquire CNN. He accused Trump of committing "an assault on our freedom of speech ... taking us down the road of Putin and China to state-controlled media." Darcy and Acosta both constantly paint the Ellisons as creating "MAGA-coded" media.

It's always bizarre to hear Jim Acosta warning of "partisan hacks" in TV news, and "propaganda networks," like CNN and Acosta weren't sounding like that for Barack Obama or against Donald Trump. Acosta told the podcasters, "We don't need to have propaganda networks in the U.S. I mean, and by the way, there's already a propaganda network over at Fox. We don't, we don't need more of them."

Despite Acosta's blathering about Trump's "campaign to basically destroy the free press in the United States," there is no shortage of negative coverage of Trump across the elitist media landscape. Anyone watching CBS right now isn't noticing much difference between them and ABC and NBC. The Big Three evening newscasts are still uber-negative about Trump, most recently about the war in Iran. In a few weeks, they'll be hating something else he does.

If you go back to Acosta's CNN war on Trump in the first term, he constantly claimed Trump was endangering the lives of reporters by calling them "Fake News" and the "Enemy of the People." Meanwhile, it couldn't be imagined that the media might inspire attempts on Trump's life by constantly suggesting he was a wannabe dictator, basically an American Hitler.

Acosta and Team Darcy pretend that CBS, CNN and The Washington Post are now under Trump's thumb. Acosta insisted "the people" have figured this out, and "that's why a lot of people are turning away from the traditional broadcast networks. They're turning away from places like The Washington Post because they're seeing these oligarchs take over these news organizations and, you know, turn them into House organs for the Trump administration."

If Acosta believes his own rhetoric, it's only because he's not actually reading or watching the journalistic output. It's more likely that he's just trying to goad them into being as hyper-critical as he is.

It's not hard to accuse a media outlet of "going soft" when they label Trump a fascist a little less often, or commit so-called atrocities like granting half a minute to the fifth anniversary of the Jan. 6 riot. It's apparently appalling to conduct an interview with the president where he gets to speak for two sentences without being aggressively Accosted, CNN-style.

This is the same attack dog who announced on CNN in 2009 that Obama's first inaugural speech "may be more than the speech of his lifetime. Historians and speechwriters say it could be one for the ages." In 2013, during the Obama inauguration parade, he gushed that "I feel like I should pinch myself right now."

The partisan hack pretends he was just as tough on Obama. He was nothing of the sort.