Veteran journalist Dan Rather said CNN White House correspondent Jim Acosta deserves a pay rise and a vacation for his coverage of the Trump administration.
“CNN should give him a raise and a week off,” Rather, who famously sparred with President Nixon at a press conference while a White House correspondent for CBS during the Watergate scandal, told Politico. “That’s how good he’s been.”
Acosta and his network’s tenuous relationship with President Trump during the 2016 presidential campaign has spilled over into the administration, with CNN being slammed repeatedly by the president as “fake news.”
In a profile piece for Politico, Acosta said the combative news conference with Trump on Jan. 11 in Trump Tower in which the president called CNN “terrible” was “a defining moment in American journalism.”
“It was an attack on all of us, on all journalists,” Acosta said.
When called upon at press conferences, Acosta has become known for his antagonistic exchanges with key officials like senior policy adviser Stephen Miller over Trump’s support of comprehensive immigration reform.
Acosta was unapologetic for the interactions, he said.
“I’ve heard people say, ‘Don’t take the bait, you’re playing into their hands,'” he said. “So, when he calls us the enemy of the people, we say nothing? When he calls us fake news, we don’t point out that he used to say Obama wasn’t born in this country? Do we not do those things? I think that’s a cop-out, I think that’s raising the white flag and saying we’re not going to do our job anymore.”
