CNN chief White House correspondent Jim Acosta writes in his newly-released book that Fox News Chanel hosts Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson are full of “fauxmacho man bullshit” because they opted to ignore him aboard a press bus instead of confronting him for his partisan reporting.
Acosta shared an excerpt of The Enemy of the People: A Dangerous Time to Tell the Truth in America to social media early Friday morning, detailing the purported incident in response to sharp criticism Hannity directed at his book.
“Hearing Sean Hannity is taking some shots at me over my book,” the CNN reporter wrote on Twitter with a graf of his book. “Two things Sean… #1 I offered to come on your show and talk about the book and you guys declined. Sad! #2 you’re in the book. It was that time you had a chance to say something to my face but didn’t. Enjoy!”
The excerpt reads:
Before long, we boarded the press buses for the main event, the Trump-Putin joint news conference. As I set foot on the bus, I immediately spotted two of my biggest critics: Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity, Trump’s chief propagandists at Fox, were seated on the bus, too. And you know what? After all their attacks on me during their prime-time “state TV” programs, they didn’t say a word to me. You’d think they would have had something to say to my face, but their fauxmacho man bullshit, as it turns out, seems to stop at the doors at the Fox News headquarters.
Of course, this is far from the first instance in which Acosta has thrown an elbow Hannity’s way.
In August 2018, Acosta attacked the Trump ally as a “propagandist for profit peddling lies every night.”
“He says he’s just a talk show host, not a journalist. But he’s injecting poison into the nation’s political bloodstream warping public attitudes about the press. I’m confident in the long run the truth will prevail,” the CNN reporter tweeted.
Hannity fired back at Acosta on social media, tweeting in a since-deleted post that “people see through your lying bullshit for what it is. FAKE NEWS.”
Carlson himself has taken several cracks at Acosta, mocking him mercilessly in a January 2019 monologue after the CNN reporter filmed himself next to a border barrier he described as “tranquil,” contending there was “no national emergency.”
“This debate is over,” Carlson declared in a sarcastic fashion. “We’re not getting a barrier along our southern border. We can’t. Not now, not ever. That possibility was permanently destroyed today by a fact-seeking missile of truth launched by one of our country’s premier cable news outlets. In a single devastating act of journalism, CNN killed the wall.”
“It took their biggest guns to do it. The network dispatched its Chief White House correspondent-slash-moral-philosopher-slash-renaissance-poet, Jim Acosta, to the U.S.-Mexico border, specifically to the Texas city of McAllen. Once on the ground, Acosta wasted no time in proving, once and for all, that: Walls. Don’t. Work,” the Fox News Channel host added.
Acosta, perhaps too embarrassed by his unforced error, did not a response to Carlson’s mockery.
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