Fake news outlet CNN’s chief White House correspondent Jim Acosta flubbed yet another major story Tuesday evening, completely missing a portion of President Donald J. Trump’s address to a joint session of Congress that zoned in on the administrative state.
Acosta falsely claimed on Twitter that President Trump made zero mentions of the “administrative state” in his speech—which received nearly universal bipartisan praise.
In fact, the president did address the administrative state. President Trump said:
We have placed a hiring freeze on non-military and non-essential Federal workers. We have begun to drain the swamp of government corruption by imposing a five year ban on lobbying by executive branch officials –- and a lifetime ban on becoming lobbyists for a foreign government. We have undertaken a historic effort to massively reduce job‑crushing regulations, creating a deregulation task force inside of every government agency; imposing a new rule which mandates that for every one new regulation, two old regulations must be eliminated; and stopping a regulation that threatens the future and livelihoods of our great coal miners.
Trump has previously described CNN as a “very fake news” outlet and has regularly sparred with Acosta himself over instances of his network publishing inaccurate reports about him.
CNN’s refusal to accurately report the news may jeopardize its parent company Time Warner’s looming multibillion dollar merger with AT&T. In his exclusive Oval Office interview with Breitbart News on Monday before this big speech, President Trump would not comment specifically on the AT&T-Time Warner proposed merger–but he did say he supports more competition in the marketplace, especially in the media.
“I don’t want to comment on any specific deal, but I do believe there has to be competition in the marketplace and maybe even more so with the media because it would be awfully bad after years if we ended up having one voice out there,” President Trump said in his Breitbart News interview. “You have to have competition in the marketplace and you have to have competition among the media. And I’m not commenting on any one deal, but you need competition generally, and you certainly need it with media.”