Politico Reporter Apologizes for ‘Caustic Remarks’ After Mocking Trump Supporters at Florida Rally.
Politico reporter Marc Caputo faced backlash on Twitter after he mocked President Donald Trump’s supporters for heckling CNN White House correspondent Jim Acosta, calling the president’s supporters “garbage” and saying they didn’t have any teeth.
Acosta checked in with CNN host Wolf Blitzer Tuesday night to report on the environment of the Trump supporters at the upcoming rally in Tampa Bay, Florida on Tuesday evening. He said they were chanting things like “CNN sucks” and “fake news.” He would later post videos on Twitter showing the crowd chanting, prompting reporters and Democratic figures to come to his defense and condemn the crowd for verbally attacking the media.
“Just a sample of the sad scene we faced at the Trump rally in Tampa. I’m very worried that the hostility whipped up by Trump and some in conservative media will result in somebody getting hurt. We should not treat our fellow Americans this way. The press is not the enemy,” Acosta tweeted.
In a now-deleted tweet, Caputo commented on the video, saying, “If you put everyone’s mouths together in this video, you’d get a full set of teeth.”
In another deleted tweet, he responded to a tweet castigating his mockery of Trump supporters. “Oh no! I made fun of garbage people jeering at another person as they falsely accused him of lying and flipped him off. Someone fetch a fainting couch,” Caputo wrote.
Two points: (1) Yes, this is what the press thinks about Trump supporters, and this now-deleted tweet was an honest reflection of that. It’s totally hypocritical for people like Acosta to clutch their pearls about Trump’s “rhetoric” given how they treat, and talk about, his supporters. And as for their fear that Trump’s “rhetoric” might lead to violence, note how they skip right over the fact that Democrat James Hodgkinson shot GOP Congressman Steve Scalise as he tried to massacre the Republican House leadership.
(2) What’s worse is, Caputo’s actually one of the better political reporters, willing to report stuff that hurts Democrats and helps Republicans without sweeping it under the rug. That’s good, but if he thinks this way, what are the rest like?
And yes, he offered a solid apology. But that doesn’t change the attitude that his original statement revealed, or the fact that it seems to be widely shared among his press colleagues.
UPDATE: From the comments: “What Acosta and his ilk are missing is that Trump isn’t whipping up that hostility, he’s just tapping into it.”
ANOTHER UPDATE: Oh, this helps: Amy Siskind reports Eric Trump for encouraging violence after he retweets video of Jim Acosta being heckled. Journalists and their hangers-on are doing more to encourage violence against journalists than Trump is.
BECKET ADAMS: CNN contributor (wrongly) accuses Trump of treason.
They keep using this word. I do not think it means what they think it means. Ret. Lt. Col. Ralph Peters, who fled Fox News for CNN in March, accused President Trump this week of treason.
“Collusion outright may not be a crime in and of itself,” he said in an interview with CNN’s Anderson Cooper, “[but] treason is a crime. Collaborating and conspiring with a hostile foreign power against the United States is a crime.”
Peters added, “Receiving material support, clandestine material support from a hostile foreign power is a crime. And we get to the people around Trump. Money laundering is a crime. Tax fraud is a crime. Lying under oath is a crime.”
Let’s back this train up for a second and look at his treason allegation. The politest way to respond is to say: He’s full of it.
I’ve enjoyed reading Peters’ novels since the late ’80s. Red Army, The War in 2020, and especially Flames of Heaven remain favorites to this day. And his non-fiction work for the US Army War College magazine Parameters during the Nineties and early Naughts was always brilliant and frequently prescient.
But lately he’s really come unhinged.
DID THEY LOSE A BIDDING WAR WITH CNN? New York Times Editorial Board Hires ‘Angry Racist’ Who Gets ‘Sick’ Pleasure Out of Racial Cruelty. “Profanity-laced tirades attacking people due to the color of their skin, joking about eugenics.”
Sarah Jeong was a senior writer for The Verge, which is a tech site owned by Vox Media, (same corporate parent as “young-adult website” Vox.com), which was co-founded by DailyKos himself, Markos Moulitsas.
YOUR DAILY TREACHER: Jim Acosta Remembers When Americans Were All on the Same Team.
That was back in 1996, when CNN’s founder was comparing Fox News to Hitler five minutes after it went on the air, I assume.
h/t SG