Fox News host Chris Wallace slammed CNN White House correspondent Jim Acosta over a verbal altercation between Acosta and President Trump during a press conference.
Wallace, the host of Fox News Sunday, bashed Acosta for his behavior at Trump’s Tuesday press conference in India during an event later that evening with New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman put on by Common Ground Committee, a group dedicated to bringing prominent leaders with opposing views together in public forums, at Columbia Journalism School.
“I was horrified by [Acosta],” Wallace explained. “It’s not our job to get in fights with presidents. It’s not our job to one-up presidents. It’s our job to report on presidents. … But to the degree we have responded to his attacks on us with attacks or advocacy in kind, there’s a huge mistake, and I think adds to people questioning the credibility of the media.”
He also expressed fear over the belief that the president’s attacks on the media have given reporters the justification to fight back.
“I worry that the president’s attacks have given too many straight news reporters, not talking about the opinion page or prime time, an excuse or license to cross the line themselves and become players on the field, and I think that is a huge mistake. It’s not our role,” Wallace added. “Our role is to be observers, umpires, fact-checkers, investigators — it’s not to be advocates. It’s not to be opponents.”
Haberman, after Wallace concluded, said she agreed with him.
In the viral exchange between the CNN White House correspondent and the president, Acosta began by asking if Trump would pledge not to accept foreign assistance in the upcoming elections, to which the president said, “I want no help from any country.”
“I haven’t been given help from any country. And if you see what CNN, your wonderful network, said, I guess they apologized in a way for — didn’t they apologize for the fact that they said certain things that weren’t true?” the president inquired of Acosta, referring to CNN’s coverage of Russian interference in the 2016 election.
“Mr. President, I think our record on delivering the truth is a lot better than yours sometimes, if you don’t mind me saying,” Acosta said to Trump, who fired back at the anchor’s history of reporting.
“Your record is so bad, you ought to be ashamed of yourself. You probably have the worst record in the history of broadcasting,” the president said.
A CNN spokesman responded to Wallace’s remarks on Twitter, saying journalists shouldn’t take the Fox News anchor’s advice.
“Chris Wallace literally works for state TV,” he tweeted. “I don’t think @Acosta or any real journalist ought to be taking advice from him. Chris, if only you spent as much time and effort sharing these morsels of wisdom with your own colleagues … ”
