It’s not terribly surprising that other media personnel may not be jumping for joy that people like Hank Green, GloZell and Bethany Mota will get actual time with the President of These United States, or that new media is a thing at all.
But it is rather distressing that a CNN Senior News Correspondent decides to snark about the whole process with upturned nose. Jim Acosta at a press briefing with Press Secretary Josh Earnest:
“Just noticing that these folks who are going to be conducting these interviews are not professional journalists, they’re people who post videos on YouTube, and I’m just curious, was ‘Charlie Bit My Finger’ or ‘David After Dentist’ not available?”
Then he pings out to the Press Secretary (who admitted he didn’t know the video) with a tweet that’s simply a link to “Charlie Bit My Finger.” Which… for a news man, that sure is an incredibly outdated look at new media. No one’s asking for “Too Many Cooks,” but generally proponents of a medium prefer it when you snark at them from this decade, and not jokes from literally seven years ago.
Naturally, Hank Green didn’t particularly care for the snide backhand and responded with some snark of his own:
@Acosta You've sold me…I'm definitely biting the president's finger. You've shown a really deep, impressive understanding of media today.
— Hank Green (@hankgreen) January 15, 2015
And also had some “listen, asshole…” words to make his point a little more directly:
@Acosta I think sometimes we need to think about how to involve people who are not reached by legacy media in the conversation. That's all.
— Hank Green (@hankgreen) January 15, 2015
Both to which Acosta responded:
No sense of humor @hankgreen? Totally agree. Good luck.
— Jim Acosta (@Acosta) January 15, 2015
@Acosta Just defending my medium! I'm sure you feel the need to do that occasionally as well.
— Hank Green (@hankgreen) January 15, 2015
Nerdfighteria didn’t have the nicest of things to say to Mr. Acosta, but one tweet in particular jumped out at me:
@Acosta "Let me insult an entirely valid profession I know nothing about and get snarky when they provide an entirely reasonable answer"
— Nathaniel daCosta (@Nate_daCosta) January 16, 2015
That’s the true source of annoyance. Because if we were to go apples-to-apples on this, Hank could very easily have thrown an episode of Real Housewives of (I Don’t Care, Pick A City) and effectively have implied the same thing about television that Acosta did about web.
It doubly annoys me, having myself covered the 2012 Presidential Election for YouTube, that journalists (even journalists whose reaches were considerably less than ours) turn their noses up to web or conflating the entirety of the industry to cat videos don’t even realize how hypocritical they are, particularly when one turns on, say, CNN and some of the nonsense they pull.
But Jim Acosta clearly thinks that our medium is worthy of only smacking us in the face and then backpedaling into “It was a joke! What, you can’t take a joke?” when we suggest that maybe he’s being a d**k. And the mind wonders why youths aren’t tuning into CNN in droves.
It’s also rich that Acosta has the balls to do that, considering that his company can’t seem to fire Don Lemon, who recently asked a human rights lawyer who happened to be Muslim if he supported the (routinely) human rights violating ISIS. You know, like you do.
But to answer your question, Jim: Yes, we have a sense of humor. But we also have time with the f**king President of the United States, an honor we don’t get very often — and, I would gather for a particular reason, an honor you don’t get very often these days either, so perhaps we would like to treat that with respect and not with irrelevant viral video jokes belittling our medium.
And next time you want to snark, Jim, at least get up to Alex From Target. So then you’ll only be six months behind the times. Or maybe just watch us covering things that matter.
Don’t worry, Jim, these meetups aren’t replacing your precious press conference. Today.
Tomorrow? Might want to start paying attention before we just decide we’d rather have your job.
