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JIM ACOSTA GIVES HIS VIEWS ON TRUMP AND THE CORRESPONDENT'S DINNER:

This year, of course, is shaping up to be an authoritarian nightmare for anybody who cares about the First Amendment. Barring any last minute crises of his own making, Trump is scheduled to attend the WHCD. And let’s be real. He does not want to toast the free press. He wants to roast it, with charcoal and lighter fluid. Guess who’s the kindling? A little reporting here but my understanding from speaking with well-placed press sources is that the leadership of the White House Correspondents Association invited Trump as a courtesy, not expecting that he would accept. Let this be a lesson. Never invite an arsonist to a matchstick factory. And make no mistake, Trump is going to burn it all down, with a long, rambling lie-filled speech.

Yes, he still carries the mental anguish from the 2011 White House Correspondents Dinner, where then-President Obama brutally mocked Trump, and the notion that the real estate developer turned reality-TV star could possibly serve as Commander-in-Chief. Trump sat there, sulking, as the C-SPAN cameras captured every moment of his agony. It was comeuppance for Trump’s birther lie. And Obama wanted to rub Trump’s nose in it.

“Now, I know that he’s taken some flak lately, but no one is happier, no one is prouder to put this birth certificate matter to rest than the Donald,” Obama quipped, mocking Trump’s penchant for conspiracy theories. “And that’s because he can finally get back to focusing on the issues that matter –- like, did we fake the moon landing? What really happened in Roswell? And where are Biggie and Tupac?” My comment, below***

But that’s not what this is about. This will be a kind of warped therapy for Trump who will almost certainly take some jabs at his first predecessor. Make sure you have “Barack Hussein Obama” on your Trump speech bingo card. The president, however, has other, larger scores to settle. Which is why we will definitely see Trump sadistically spike the football and celebrate his menacing victory over the American news media. As I have written before, Trump has cracked the code in how to hurt the press - in ways that likely exceeded even his wildest, late night, Truth Social fever dreams. 

Not only has he extracted multi-million dollar legal settlements, i.e. intimidation payments, from two of the nation’s major TV networks, ABC and CBS. His administration has essentially installed the MAGA-friendly Ellison family in charge of CBS and, perhaps very soon, CNN as well. The Ellisons have, in turn, placed the right-wing pundit, Bari Weiss at the helm of CBS News and, of all places, “60 Minutes.” Trump’s FCC chair, Brendan Carr**, is the press henchman doing much of Trump’s media dirty work, infamously gunning but failing to remove Jimmy Kimmel from his late-night talk show slot at ABC. Trump and Carr have since claimed that they have forced the major networks to oust the president’s least favorite anchors and television hosts from their jobs in TV, including yours truly. That’s on top of a whole host of other assaults on the news media, from the arrests of journalists Don Lemon and Georgia Fort to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s adoption of undemocratic restrictions at the Pentagon, which prompted dozens of reporters to hand in their press badges."

**Editor's comment: Was Obama's takedown of Trump too clever by half? Was that night in 2011 what inspired Trump to run for an office for which he was not qualified in the first place?

**Comment: Carr has said he is looking at the media for "leftwing bias". Really? That's his job? First, I pose this question: what is inherently wrong with such bias, which is to say a belief system, if it is presented as commentary or editorial matter? Secondly, what about all the rightwing bias that is presented on Fox News (cable, not broadcast) and AM radio coast to coast on several thousand radio stations? That's okay? 

Sinclair Broadcasting and NextStar group station owner/operators have all but come and said publicly that they favor Republican causes (as many business people, probably a majority, do also). Those broadcasters will have no trouble with the FCC although the courts have stepped in to the latest NextStar group purchase arrangement. What is moving forward in television stations is concentration in the hands of the few, different opinions be damned.

Carr has no "jurisdiction" of any sort over cable news channels because they are not taking up the so called "public airwaves". Nor, for that matter, does Trump, though he can keep suing everyone to try to get his way and, in the process, intimidate those who are not sued. We now face a situation of big corporate power taking over major outlets and trying to turn them in Trump's direction, specifically CBS News and CNN. Watch and listen with great care. Sometimes bias will be hidden, other times it will be outright, easy to spot.

If we are to have a free country, with freedom of thought, we must have free media searching for the truth about our times. Truly biased media mixes fiction, facts and conclusions all in one ugly pile. Some people are happy to have their own way of looking at the world confirmed by televised, radio broadcast and website commentators. Getting stuck in one way of thinking is, however, a trap because the world itself does not fit into such an orderly set.