Fox's Howard Kurtz: It was a “misstep” for the White House to smear Jim Acosta with a “doctored video put out by Infowars”
Written by Media Matters Staff
Published
From the November 8 edition of Fox News' America's Newsroom:
SANDRA SMITH (CO-ANCHOR): Sarah Sanders put out this tweet in response to revoking his press pass. They stand by that decision. She's most recently tweeted, “President Trump believes in a free press and expects and welcomes tough questions of him and his administration. We will, however, never tolerate a reporter placing his hands on a young woman just trying to do her job as White House intern.” The White House Correspondents' Association, however, making it clear that they do not support this decision:“The Correspondents' Association strongly objects to the Trump administration's decision to use U.S. Secret Service security credentials as a tool to punish a reporter with whom it has a difficult relationship. Revoking access to the White House complex is a reaction out of line to the purported offense and is unacceptable.” Howie?
HOWARD KURTZ (FOX NEWS MEDIA ANALYST): Yeah, I think it's a misstep on the part of the White House to claim that Jim Acosta was laying his hands on this young intern who tried to take the mic away. The contact was very incidental. I also think it was a misstep for Sarah Sanders to tweet out a doctored video put out by Infowars, the Alex Jones' conspiracy site that kind of made it look more aggressive than it was. His real offense here was being rude, as the president said, and he called him a terrible person. I don't know, President Trump knew what he was getting when he called on Jim Acosta, maybe he wanted some kind of confrontation. If so, Acosta played into his hands. But now you have CNN, you know, which says it tries to cover the president fairly, putting out a statement saying that the president's attacks on the press are un-American -- that's a really strong word. And so another setback for the relationship, the very tense relationship, as we saw throughout that 90 minute news conference between the president and some of his questioners.
Previously:
The Infowars-White House pipeline is alive and well
Fox's Chris Wallace attacks CNN reporter: “Acosta's behavior was shameful” while questioning Trump