"The art of dealing with Trump"

Summary

Podcast Summary: "The Jim Acosta Show" – Episode: "The Art of Dealing with Trump"

Release Date: April 6, 2025
Host: Jim Acosta
Description: Don't give into the lies. Don't give into fear. Hold on to the truth. And hope.
Link: jimacosta.substack.com

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1. Introduction

In this episode of "The Jim Acosta Show," host Jim Acosta delves deep into his experiences confronting former President Donald Trump, exploring the challenges journalists face when dealing with powerful political figures. The episode features an insightful interview with Shonette Plato from NRK, as well as contributions from Norwegian journalists, Sigurd Falkenberg Mickelsl, Johan Huldgram from NRK and Afton PostNL, and Armin Buckvoss from Werger.

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2. Trump’s Initial Attack on Jim Acosta

The episode opens with a recount of Trump’s aggressive stance towards Jim Acosta, highlighting a pivotal moment where Trump called Acosta “one of the worst and most dishonest reporters in journalistic history” (04:56). Despite the personal attacks, Acosta frames these insults as a “badge of honor,” emphasizing resilience in the face of intimidation.

Donald Trump ([00:00]-[00:21]): "Fake news. Fake news. No, no, no, no, no, no. You're not a very good reporter... It's a very rude introduction."

Jim Acosta ([04:56]-[05:12]): "Oh, I mean, he meant it as an insult, but I take it as a badge of honor... You don’t let those sorts of insults throw you off your game."

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3. The Art of Dealing with Trump

a. Press Credentials and Legal Battles

Acosta recounts his tenure as CNN’s chief White House correspondent, detailing how Trump eventually stripped him of his press pass—a move Acosta successfully challenged in court. This legal battle set a precedent cited in the Associated Press (AP) lawsuit aiming to regain White House access after being ousted for not conforming to Trump’s terminology preferences.

Jim Acosta ([12:20]-[14:23]):
"Mr. President, I'll tell you what. CNN should be ashamed of itself having you working for them. You are a rude, terrible person."

Acosta emphasizes the importance of standing up against such pressures to maintain journalistic integrity.

b. Strategies for Journalists

Shonette Plato probes Acosta on his strategies for handling Trump’s aggressive tactics. Acosta underscores the necessity of not capitulating to tyrannical demands, advocating for reporters to "stand up to the bully" rather than "cower."

Jim Acosta ([15:10]-[15:56]):
"I am a dad. And when he picks on people in that fashion... the example that I want to be set is that you stand up to the bully... You don’t kneel before the tyrant."

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4. Impact on Journalism

a. Threats to Press Freedom

Acosta discusses the broader implications of Trump’s actions on press freedom, warning of a slippery slope where any leader could potentially dictate media coverage, endangering the First Amendment rights.

Jim Acosta ([16:22]-[17:46]):
"You can't have the president dictating who gets to cover an administration... You can envision other foreign leaders around the world saying, 'Look what they do in America now.'"

b. The Associated Press Case

The episode highlights the AP’s struggle to regain access after refusing to adopt Trump’s preferred terminology. Acosta criticizes the petty nature of such demands, advocating for collective action among news organizations to resist these encroachments.

Jim Acosta ([20:04]-[21:03]):
"They put out some statements. I'm not sure they've gone far enough... You have to send a message to the White House that they can't continue kick out news organizations."

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5. Global Impact

a. Norwegian Journalists’ Perspectives

Norwegian journalists share their experiences dealing with Trump’s influence, emphasizing the constant pressure to provide context in reporting to avoid sensationalism. They discuss the challenges of maintaining journalistic integrity amidst Trump's relentless media presence.

Norwegian Journalist ([28:13]-[30:15]):
"We joke about it in the newsroom, that we always have to give context... This is also some sort of a new modern war propaganda."

b. Self-Censorship and Media Trust

The discussion shifts to the fear of self-censorship among journalists, both in the U.S. and globally. Acosta voices concerns over major media companies potentially succumbing to pressure, thereby weakening the credibility and independence of journalism.

Jim Acosta ([59:24]-[61:44]):
"These kind of conversations are absolutely happening... What happens inside the newsrooms that are owned by these large companies."

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6. The Role of Independent Journalism

a. Transition to Substack

Acosta touches upon his move to Substack, highlighting the platform’s role in fostering independent journalism free from corporate and political pressures. He praises platforms like ProPublica for their commitment to uncovering truth without succumbing to defamation fears.

Jim Acosta ([63:44]-[64:15]):
"The emergence of organizations like ProPublica is a very healthy development... The emergence of independent media, nonprofit media in the United States is one of the healthiest developments."

b. Importance of Nonprofit News Organizations

He underscores the significance of nonprofit news organizations in maintaining media credibility and accountability, especially in an era dominated by polarized news outlets.

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7. Conclusion and Insights

In wrapping up, Acosta reflects on the critical state of American journalism under Trump’s influence. He stresses the necessity for journalists to uphold truth and resist becoming tools of political agendas. The episode concludes with a call for collective action among media organizations to protect press freedom and ensure unbiased reporting.

Jim Acosta ([44:36]-[44:36]):
"Trump wants a situation that is more like what goes on in dictatorships... that is the problem that we're up against."

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Notable Quotes

• Jim Acosta at [04:56]:
  "I take it as a badge of honor... You don’t let those sorts of insults throw you off your game."

• Donald Trump at [14:33]:
  "You're a very rude person. The way you treat Sarah Huckabee is horrible... You shouldn't treat people that way."

• Jim Acosta at [17:46]:
  "What happens inside the newsrooms... You can't have the president dictating who gets to cover an administration."

• Jim Acosta at [51:48]:
  "The press has to find its spine, find its backbone and stand up and defend what we do."

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Key Takeaways

• Resilience in Journalism: Despite facing personal attacks and systemic challenges, journalists like Jim Acosta continue to uphold press freedom by standing firm against political intimidation.

• Collective Action Needed: There is a pressing need for media organizations to unite in resisting political interference to protect the integrity of journalism.

• Global Implications: The erosion of press freedom in the U.S. serves as a cautionary tale for journalists worldwide, highlighting the universal value of unbiased reporting.

• Rise of Independent Media: Platforms like Substack and nonprofit organizations are becoming pivotal in sustaining truthful journalism amidst increasing polarization and corporate pressures.

• Importance of Contextual Reporting: Providing context is essential in reporting on figures like Trump to avoid sensationalism and maintain credibility.

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This episode serves as a profound exploration of the intersection between politics and journalism, offering valuable insights into the strategies and resilience required to maintain a free and fair press in challenging times.

Transcript

[Donald Trump]

Fake news. Fake news. No, no, no, no, no, no. You're not a very good reporter. They can't toy with me like they toy with everybody else. It's a very rude introduction. Your organization.

[Jim Acosta]

You are attacking our news organization.

[Donald Trump]

Your organization.

[Jim Acosta]

Can you give us a chance? Let's ask a question, sir.

[Shonette Plato]

Nobody has the right to go into.

[Jim Acosta]

The Oval Office and ask the President.

[Shonette Plato]

Of the United States questions. That's an invitation that is given.

[Donald Trump]

I said tariff is my favorite word in the dictionary, and I got killed by the fake news. No clash. I was there. You're just a troublemaker. Who are you with? No wonder, because I think they're a fake news network, a terrible network. To get me, somebody would have to shoot through the fake news. And I don't mind that so much. I don't mind.

[Unknown Speaker]

The world is trembling right now because of the actions of one man, the President of the United States. And even if many of us would prefer maybe not to think about Donald Trump all the time, he still fills our newspapers, our broadcasts, and our podcasts, and our minds all the time. We're struggling as journalists with a basic question. How do we cover Trump in a way that's fair, that's informative, without making us and our audiences crazy?

And.

And we at Scoop are excited, and we're honored that we have with us here today someone who has more experience than most when it comes to the art of dealing with Trump. Now, back in 2016, I was on a reporting trip to Cuba, to Havana, to cover the visit by President Obama. He was going to visit the Cuban president. And the highlight of this trip, at least for me, was a press conference between the two presidents. And the press had been told that there would be one question for the American press, one for the Cuban press, and Barack Obama, he chose to point at a Cuban American journalist from CNN now, Jim Acosta. He had been asking a lot of hard questions of Obama, and Obama had at times become a bit annoyed with this line of questioning. But what happened then? To me, sort of, it showcases how much things have changed over these past nine years because he pointed to Jim Acosta. And Jim, he delivered. He asked a question straight to Raul Castro and asked him about political prisoners in Cuba. And Castro, he became very agitated, very angry, and he said, no, we don't have any political prisoners in Cuba. And it was a beautiful moment. It was a moment, to me, that showed the true power of journalism. Jim Acosta, he went on working for CNN through the first Trump administration and then through the Biden years. And if Obama was at times annoyed with Jim. Trump took that to a whole new level. We'll see an example of that later. And eventually he took away Jim's press accreditation to the White House. But he kept working, he kept asking his hard questions, doing his job, and for very many people, he became a prime example of how to hold power to account. Today, Jim runs his own show on Substack, and that's a show I can highly recommend to everyone that you check that out. It's informative and he is still full of good analyses and hard hitting questions. And you'll be meeting him now. And we're also tremendously lucky that Sonette Plato from NRK has agreed to open this conference by interviewing Jim here on stage. So please welcome to the stage Shonette Plato and Jim Acosta.

[Shonette Plato]

Here we are.

[Jim Acosta]

Jim, how are you?

[Shonette Plato]

I'm good. How are you?

[Jim Acosta]

Good.

[Shonette Plato]

All right. As everybody heard here, the session right now is the art of dealing with Trump. And if anybody knows a thing or two about dealing with Trump, it's you, Jim.

[Jim Acosta]

I guess so.

[Shonette Plato]

Oh, yeah. So after years as chief White House correspondent for cnn anchor, domestic correspondent, you decided to leave CNN in January. And Trump, who we would assume was a very busy man at the time in January, took the time out to write on his favorite social media, truth social. He wrote a little thing about you. He said, wow, really good news. Jim Acosta, one of the worst and most dishonest reporters in journalistic history. A major sleazebag. He went on. Jim is a major loser who will fail no matter where he ends. Good luck, Jim. So my question then is, is that an honor or an insult?

[Jim Acosta]

Oh, I mean, he meant it as an insult, but I take it as a badge of honor, as we would say back in America. I mean, you would think he would have better things to do. This was only, I think, a week or so after he was back in the White House and he's taking time out to take a shot at me. I guess I should be honored.

[Shonette Plato]

Yeah.

[Jim Acosta]

Yeah.

[Shonette Plato]

Well, I don't know. I think so, too. Were you surprised? Were you provoked? Were you motivated?

[Jim Acosta]

Oh, no. I mean, I wasn't surprised at all. I mean, this is how he spends a lot of his time. You know, I think he is under the impression that 25% of being president of the United States is trolling and attacking his political or his perceived political enemies. My sense of it is, is that, you know, you just have to take those things in stride. And as you were saying, you know, you can take it as an Honor. But no, you don't let those sorts of insults throw you off your game. That would be the opposite of what you should do.

[Shonette Plato]

Christopher, he mentioned that you're on Substack now as an independent journalist, and we're going to talk a little bit about what that role implies and how you can use it. But before we go there, I think we're going to take a step back and look a little bit at your time in the White House as chief correspondent for cnn. And I was thinking maybe you could take us into the plane, because I know that you were on Air Force One the day that Trump left the White House in January 2021. And we thought, right, that's it, we're rid of, you know, sorry, I'm too honest about what I feel about it.

[Jim Acosta]

Yes. But, yeah, we all thought we were rid of them. We all thought that was it. It was over.

[Shonette Plato]

You were on the plane with him as he left.

[Jim Acosta]

Yeah. In the United States, and maybe it's the same in parts of Europe. We have a pool of reporters that travels with the president pretty much at all times. And back in those days, as it turns out, on Inauguration Day, when Joe Biden was coming into office, Donald Trump was leaving office, I was in the pool of reporters to cover Trump that day. You know, again, Badge of Honor. And, you know, we were, Remember, this was two weeks after January 6th, the attack on the United States Capitol. And he was not going to participate in the inauguration with Joe Biden. And so he insisted on having his own departure ceremony at Joint Base Andrews, the Air Force base that they keep Air Force One at. And I described it on CNN as a ceremony for a dictator going into exile. That's the way it looked. I mean, it had sort of all the trappings of sort of a military ceremony. I think there was sort of a 21 gun salute, something along those lines. There was music. And I remember seeing Donald Trump Jr. And Ivanka and Eric Trump. They were all there and they were crying. It was a very dramatic scene. And the thought running through my mind the entire time was, my goodness, I just hope he gets on that plane. Because at that time, it wasn't a.

[Shonette Plato]

Given at the time.

[Jim Acosta]

It was not a given at the time. And, you know, he was technically still the president until noon that day. So theoretically speaking, he could have tried to order the Secret Service or whomever to take him back to the we just don't know what he was going to do. It was that unpredictable. Fortunately, the plan was for him to get on Air Force One and that's what he did. We all got on with him. And, you know, when we got on Air Force One, I remember a couple of my friends in the press corps saying, jim, did you bring your parachute just in case? And I thought to myself, that's funny, but also not funny, because we shouldn't rule anything out. And fortunately, you know, he. He got off the plane in West Palm Beach, Florida, and went off to Mar a Lago, and that was it.

[Shonette Plato]

With Bologna, or did they.

[Jim Acosta]

With Bolania. They came down the steps together, and then they kind of went their separate ways, is what I remember. And I don't know what. Maybe she had somewhere to go. But what I remember at that time was on Air Force One, as we were making that flight down to Florida, we were hopeful that he would come back and talk to us one last time. And he wouldn't do that. So he was probably sulking up in the main cabin of the plane. But one of his aides, who is still with him, this woman Margot, came back to us and talked to us for a while, and she said, he's not very good at sitting still. And it just said to me, you know, that was a bit of an ominous sign that. And I thought all along, this is perhaps not the end of Trump. I mean, a lot of people at that time in Washington thought this was the end of Trump. He was going to be leaving the political scene. He was leaving in disgrace. There was no way he could make a comeback. And I would tell people all the time, Trump may be gone, but Trumpism is not. And that has very much been the case ever since. And, of course, that's what put him back in the White House.

[Shonette Plato]

We're going to talk a little bit about the White House pool. As you said, you were part of it.

[Jim Acosta]

Yeah.

[Shonette Plato]

Can you just very briefly describe how that works so that we understand now what the AP is actually kicked out of?

[Jim Acosta]

Yeah. So there's a large press corps, obviously, in Washington. And because there are so many of us, and if you include the foreign press, our friends and the foreign press who come, people like Christopher, you can't put 200 reporters in the Oval Office. It would be too chaotic. There was one occasion where I think there was a South Korean photographer who knocked over a lamp in the Oval Office one time because there were too many of us. And so what they do on a daily basis, they select a pool of reporters, which just means a small group of us, one representing the TV networks, There might be a camera person from the TV networks, and then New York Times, Washington Post, Associated Press, Reuters, Bloomberg, and then maybe a few others who kind of are on a rotating basis with their other colleagues in the press corps. And that's the pool. And so what's very important about this matter with the Associated Press, the Associated Press typically has a daily presence in the White House pool. There are almost every day guaranteed to have that slot. The reason why is because the Associated Press is a very large organizations all around the world.

[Shonette Plato]

I think many of us here, 100.

[Jim Acosta]

Countries, it's in all 50 states, it's read by billions of people. And so they have an important position there. And so what happened with the Associated Press after Trump came back into office? You'll all remember that he decided that the Gulf of Mexico was suddenly going to be called the Gulf of America because even though it had been called the Gulf of Mexico for hundreds of years, that wasn't good enough for Donald Trump. He likes to create his own reality. So he wanted to call it the Gulf of America. The Associated Press, I think, made the right editorial decision in its content to continue to call it the Gulf of Mexico. They were refusing to buckle to his demands. And because of that, he threw them out of the White House press pool. They're no longer allowed in the Oval Office. They're no longer allowed on Air Force One. They, the AP has sued to get that access back. And in their lawsuit, they cited my case that Christopher mentioned earlier.

[Shonette Plato]

And that's when I'm going to stop.

[Jim Acosta]

You, when I press pass got taken away and we had to sue to get back.

[Shonette Plato]

And I think we're going to have a little look at that moment because this was in 2018, right? Yep. And I think maybe many people have said that was the start of what was to come. And what we see now with the AP and as, as you said, the AP is referring to your case. Let's take a look at the infamous press conference where Trump gets pretty mad at you and calls you and CNN enemy of the people.

[Jim Acosta]

Thank you, Mr. President. I wanted to challenge you on one of the statements that you made in the tail end of the campaign in the midterms that here we go, that. Well, if you don't mind, Mr. President, that this caravan was an invasion, as you know. Mr.

[Donald Trump]

I consider it to be an invasion.

[Jim Acosta]

As you know, Mr. President, the caravan was not an invasion. It's a, it's a group of migrants moving up from Central America towards the border with the U.S. thank you for taking. Why did you characterize it as such?

[Donald Trump]

Because I consider it an invasion. You and I have a difference of opinion.

[Jim Acosta]

Do you think that you demonized immigrants in this election to try to.

[Donald Trump]

I want them to come into the country, but they have to come in legally. You know, they have to come in, Jim, through a process. I want it to be a process, and I want people to come in. And we need the people.

[Jim Acosta]

Your campaign. Your campaign.

[Unknown Speaker]

Wait.

[Donald Trump]

You know why we need the people, don't you? Because we have hundreds of companies moving in. We need the people.

[Jim Acosta]

But your campaign had an ad showing migrants climbing over walls and so on.

[Donald Trump]

They weren't actors.

[Jim Acosta]

They're not going to be doing that.

[Donald Trump]

They weren't actors. Well, no, it's true. Do you think they were actors? They weren't actors. They didn't come from Hollywood. These were. These were people. This was an actual. You know, it happened a few days ago.

[Jim Acosta]

And they're hundreds of miles away, though. They're hundreds and hundreds of miles away. That's not an invasion.

[Donald Trump]

Honestly, I think you should let me run the country. You run cnn. And if you did it well, your ratings.

[Jim Acosta]

Let me ask, if I may ask, Mr. President, if I may ask one question. Are you worried.

[Donald Trump]

That's enough. That's enough. That's enough.

[Jim Acosta]

That's one of the other folks.

[Donald Trump]

That's enough.

[Jim Acosta]

Pardon me, ma'am.

[Donald Trump]

That's enough.

[Jim Acosta]

Mr. President, I had one other, if I may ask, on. On the Russia investigation. Are you concerned that. That you may have.

[Donald Trump]

I'm not concerned about anything with Russian investigation because it's a hoax. That's enough. Put down the mic.

[Jim Acosta]

Ms. President, are you worried about indictments coming down in this investigation?

[Donald Trump]

Mr. President, I'll tell you what. CNN should be ashamed of itself having you working for them. You are a rude, terrible person. You shouldn't be working for cnn.

[Jim Acosta]

Go ahead. I think that's unfair.

[Donald Trump]

You're a very rude person. The way you treat Sarah Huckabee is horrible. And the way you treat other people are horrible. You shouldn't treat people that way.

[Jim Acosta]

Go ahead. Go ahead, Peter. Go ahead. In Jim's defense, I've traveled with him and watched him. He's a diligent reporter who bust.

[Donald Trump]

Well, I'm not a big fan of yours either, so I understand, to be honest.

[Unknown Speaker]

So let me ask you a question, if I can.

[Donald Trump]

You repeatedly said you are the best. Mr. President.

[Jim Acosta]

You repeatedly, over the course of.

[Donald Trump]

Just sit down, please. Well, when you. When you report fake news. No, when you report fake news, which CNN does a lot, you are the enemy of the people. Go ahead, Mr. President.

[Jim Acosta]

You can't let it get under your skin. You can't get it.

[Shonette Plato]

Why didn't you sit down?

[Jim Acosta]

Why did I not sit down?

[Shonette Plato]

What was going on in your head?

[Jim Acosta]

Well, because, I mean, you know, to berate a reporter in that fashion, you know what I would tell people from time to time? I'm dad. And when he picks on people in that fashion, the example that I want to be set is that you stand up to the bully. You don't cower in front of the bully. You don't kneel before the tyrant, you don't kneel before the dictator. And I think that is the message that I wanted to get across in the way that I was standing up for myself. If he can call me all the names that he wants, but if he's going to insist that I sit down when I'm not finished answering my questions, that's just not going to happen. He may, he can rule over his own household in that fashion if he would like, but that's not going to work with me.

[Shonette Plato]

So as a result of this, you lost your press pass. CNN took the White House to court and you got your press pass back. And now, as you said, the AP is in a very similar situation. And just a few days ago, the AP again was going to a federal judge who has not decided yet on whether they're getting their press pass back. You've spoken to them, I believe. What's the inside news on this?

[Jim Acosta]

Well, I think this is going to take some time. One of the issues that I ran into with my press pass case, when we took the case before a federal judge, as a matter of fact, it was a Trump appointed federal judge. One of the things that the Trump administration was trying to say back at that time in 2018 was that the White House can pick and choose which reporters cover the administration, cover the White House. Which is obviously a ridiculous notion. I mean, in a country with a constitution and a bill of rights and the First Amendment, freedom of the speech, freedom of the press, you can't have the president dictating who gets to cover an administration. And the reason why I say it that way is because it's a real slippery slope. You can have a situation in the United States where governors, mayors, various leaders and different jurisdictions decide all of a sudden, well, Donald Trump, he can decide who covers the White House, we can decide who covers the state Capitol. You can envision other foreign leaders around the world saying, well, look what they do in America now. They've weakened the First Amendment to freedom of the press. Where they can kick out reporters, kick out news organizations. Hey, why don't we do that, too? So I think it's very important for American journalists. For the Associated Press, we thought it was important at the time, when I was at my former employer, that we stand up for ourselves, we stand up for our rights to make sure that not just this president, but any president can't rule over us like a dictator.

[Shonette Plato]

Now, the latest right now is that they want to change the seating arrangement. I want to control who's sitting where.

[Jim Acosta]

It's very petty, isn't it? Well, I mean, first of all, how petty is that, that we're going to decide, okay, you sit up there and you move over here and move. I mean, I'm sorry, but again, this goes back to, to when Trump put out the tweet about me. Don't you people have more important things to do? I mean, look at the, look at the stock market today. I mean, it gives you a clear example. They need to be focused on minding the store, let's say, back in America.

[Shonette Plato]

Well, they're a friendly journalist in front asking the question.

[Jim Acosta]

And you saw when that video montage that they were playing at the beginning of all this, Trump was berating, or J.D. vance was berating, Volodymyr Zelenskyy. There was a reporter in that room who was selected by the White House. This person, I think his name is Brian Glenn. He's apparently the boyfriend of Marjorie Taylor Greene, who is a very conservative congresswoman back in the United States in Georgia. And for some reason, I guess because he's her boyfriend, he gets to be in the press corps. I don't know what else he does besides being her boyfriend. But he's in there and he's asking. And he's in there and he's asking, Zelensky, why aren't you wearing a suit? And I don't know how much you guys follow what goes on in the White House, but just this week, the musician Kid Rock was in the Oval Office with Donald Trump. And you should see what Kid Rock was wearing in the Oval Office. He was wearing a suit, but it was a very different kind of suit. It wasn't this kind of a suit.

[Shonette Plato]

And also there's Elon Musk, who, you know, many have pointed out he's, he doesn't wear suits.

[Jim Acosta]

He doesn't wear a suit either. And so, you know, some of this gets into, into a lot of silliness. And, you know, one of the interesting things that was said during my case, during this exchange here Was, you know, the, the, the attorneys for the Trump administration were saying, well, you know, Jim, is, was being very rude toward the President of the United States. And my attorney at that time, Ted Boutro, said, hold on a second. In almost every situation, Donald Trump is the rudest person in the room.

[Shonette Plato]

Yes, good starting point. So it's the White House Correspondence association, who sort of, up until now at least, has been deciding who's in the pool.

[Jim Acosta]

Right.

[Shonette Plato]

What are they actually doing to counter this?

[Jim Acosta]

Well, they put out some statements. I'm not sure they've gone far enough, I think, you know, my advice to the White House Correspondents association is you have to take collective action. You have to send a message to the White House that they can't continue kick out news organizations, because if they can kick out the Associated Press, then they can start kicking out the television networks, they can kick out individual journalists. The thing that makes this situation more serious is, in my case, they just try to kick out an individual journalist. In the AP case, they're kicking out an entire news organization, one that's very important. And so my advice to the White House Correspondents association is pretty simple. Take away Trump's cameras for a day.

[Shonette Plato]

But they haven't wanted to do that.

[Jim Acosta]

If all of the television networks and all of the photographers decided one day we're not going to go in there and take his pictures, I guarantee you he will start changing his attitude very quickly. He is basically addicted to having those television cameras on.

[Shonette Plato]

He loves those cameras. But that hasn't happened yet.

[Jim Acosta]

They have not happened yet. No. And there's a concern, I think, on the part of the news organizations that they will lose their access. But the question that I ask, and I was talking about this with Christopher earlier today, is what are you losing access to? You're losing access to somebody who lies almost all the time. You know, you can have Fox and a couple of other news organizations go in there that are friendly to Trump and they can play that stuff and we can get it and we can fact check it. No big deal. But to think that it's going to make a huge difference if you go in there and you're in the room with him when they're taking these kinds of actions against the Associated Press, to me, that doesn't make sense. It makes more sense to stand up for your friends and your colleagues in the press corps first, then you try to have the best access that you can. And at this point, I don't think the Correspondence association is going to get to the point where they Want to be with the AP coming back in until some kind of collective action is taken.

[Shonette Plato]

Okay, so moving on a little bit. I was a student at Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, as there was 9 11, which obviously was a very interesting time to be a journalism student in New York with Access of Evil. There were quite hard fronts at the time as well, but there was never a moment where any of my international fellow students or I. There was never a moment when we were worried about losing our visas or being chucked out of the country for the difficult questions we were asking. And now we see a very. Well, I don't even know what adjective to use, but it's a horrifying situation with Mahmoud Khalil, who's, you know, the Columbia student with a green card who fronted the demonstrations, Israel Habas War. And he's, you know, they're trying to throw him out of the country. And we also see Trump threatening to sue any media or media outlets. The press who use anonymous sources.

[Jim Acosta]

Yeah.

[Shonette Plato]

So what is that doing right now to journalists and sources in terms of this fear of the ramifications it may have?

[Jim Acosta]

Well, a couple of things. I mean, one is, first of all, we should point out a lot of the times those anonymous sources that we're talking to are people who work for him.

[Shonette Plato]

Right.

[Jim Acosta]

So we should point that out. I used to talk to people who work for him. I still talk to some of his aides and advisors from time to time. And they will tell you to the best of their ability, I think, to a great extent, what is going on. Obviously, they may have an agenda. You have to be careful about that. That's one of the issues with anonymous sources. That's why you try to get multiple sources to try to get at the best version of the truth that you can get to. But I do think there's another component to all of this. And. And when you talk about going after anonymous sourcing and so on, what Trump has been doing lately is he has been threatening defamation lawsuits at big companies. He's done this with abc. He's done this with cbs. In the case of abc, Disney, the parent company of abc, decided to settle that defamation lawsuit to the tune of millions of dollars that I believe were donated to a future Trump presidential library. Now, you know, ladies and gentlemen, I don't think that's a good development for journalism in the United States when you have a major media company deciding to cut a big check to the President of the United States to essentially curry favor, to put something to rest. And in the case of the ABC lawsuit, and I think especially in the case of the CBS lawsuit, these cases are so specious, they're so, you know, porous and full of holes. I don't think anybody should expect that if that had gone to a jury and gotten to a verdict, that it would have gone against those news organizations. These organizations are essentially just trying to get this problem, this monkey, off their back, so to speak. And I think it's very damaging to.

[Shonette Plato]

The press in the US we're very soon going to get several of the Norwegian foreign editors up here on stage. But before we do that, I'd like to ask you, it's a rather big question, but as an independent journalist now you're on Substack. You have about 300,000 followers, 10,000 paying. I, I think if we believe the New York Times article, and you are an independent journalist now. So because you could speak so freely right now, how would you say that Trump is changing journalism in the States?

[Jim Acosta]

Well, he's trying very hard to chip away at the First Amendment. He's trying very hard to spread fear in the press corps and make us pull our punches. And to me, that is when the press really has to find its spine, find its backbone and stand up and defend what we do. And that not just means defending other American journalists, but what journalists do all around the world. I mean, as I remember from my days at the White House, there are so many people in the foreign press and so many of them are my friends. And my goodness, if we were to chip away at freedom of the press for American journalists, it's not going to be a good situation for foreign journalists coming to the United States. And so one of the reasons why I'm so passionate about this and people give me a hard time and say, oh, Jim, you know, aren't you a bit too much, or don't you take things too far, or are you making yourself the story and so on.

[Shonette Plato]

People haven't heard it yet, and I highly recommend listening to it. It's very. You're very clear on what you mean about Trump. I mean, it's pretty blocks off, no?

[Jim Acosta]

And on Substack, I'm very clear about how I feel, and I think that that's helpful to be honest with the subscribers and the listeners and the viewers. But this cannot be allowed to fall the free press in the United States, because if that happens in America, you can envision a scenario where it starts happening all around the world. And can you imagine a situation where our sense of truth and reality is the reality, the warped Reality in Trump's mind, things like calling the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America. Just yesterday on Fox, as the stock market was crashing, one of the commentators on Fox said, oh, that's okay. I don't care what happens to my 401k. I just believe in this man. And we can't go into that sort of Alice in Wonderland, through the Looking Glass, sort of down the rabbit hole dystopia. That just doesn't work. And, you know, we don't want to live in George Orwell's 1984. I think the world as it stands right now, where we all have a grip on reality, that's the place where we want to live.

[Shonette Plato]

Okay, we're going to move over now to the next part of the session, and I'd like to ask Sigurd Falkenberg Mickelsl and Johan Huldgram from NRK and Afton PostNL and Armin Buckvoss from Werger to come up, please. So we've now been discussing how this has been influencing American journalism. And of course, it's definitely, definitely influencing Norwegian journalism as well. You can just gather around. Gentlemen, join me.

[Jim Acosta]

Welcome, Coke Zero.

[Shonette Plato]

Okay, so, Amil, I'd like to start with you. Now, you're a foreign affairs journalist specializing in the Middle East. Whoops. This is a walk and talk kind of situation, all right. Yes. You're specializing in the Middle east and you're writing every day. You're an active journalist. And I'd like to ask you, how is Trump influencing Norwegian journalism?

[Unknown Speaker]

It's definitely a 24 hours a day, seven days a week affair. We deal with Trump all the time, every hour of the day. I don't think there's ever a moment that his face is not on our front page at one kind of way. So we have to deal with him. There's no other choice. We cannot decide not to tell our readers, the Norwegian public, what he says, what he does. So we can't. At least we have to report on everything. But I think. So this is the issue. We're talking about it every day, how to deal with it. We're saying the word context a lot. We joke about it in the newsroom, that we always have to give context. We cannot just do, as many of us did in his first term, that we called some sort of an expert who said, this is crazy. And then the headline was, this is crazy. And we all just laughed and joked and had some sort of fun. Also we laugh here today, but it's a deeply serious matter. So I think we need to just take a deep breath, gather us. And when we publish, it's thought through how we do it and what kind of headlines we do, because so often we are used to in journalism to add the flavor, we need to get a headline running, you know, to get people to read it. But with Trump, he's so tabloid that we almost have to take it down a notch to. To explain.

[Shonette Plato]

Why don't you give us an example? We discussed this one before, this interview, for example, with the AI video. We saw some of it, you know, with Trump and Elon dancing with belly dancers in the Middle East.

[Unknown Speaker]

Yeah, it's a good example. I. I have two kids, so I woke up at 4, 4 in the night, and I saw that this video was published. And I said, I hope people back at the office, it's not just publishing it as it is, without the context it needs.

[Shonette Plato]

What kind of context?

[Unknown Speaker]

No, I believe. And what we did, nothing was published. And I got to the office and we discussed how to do it, and we made a video where we didn't use so much of that video, but I tried to explain in a TV clip, what is the context of what this video with what so many experts are calling ethnic cleansing. A plan of ethnic cleansing in Gaza to push the Palestinians out. In this video, with golden statues and money just flowing around, there was no dead kids. There were no real pictures of how it looks when Palestinians are moving. So I believe we needed to put these layers of truth to this. This is also some sort of a new modern war propaganda. You know, it's. It's in the new world of memes. So we need to not laugh too much about it, but be serious.

[Shonette Plato]

Sigurd, you and several other foreign editors had a meeting in January, both to discuss how various Norwegian media had covered the election, but also the way forward. Could you tell us a little bit about that meeting? What were the discussions?

[Unknown Speaker]

Yes, it came up after all the discussions we had during the election campaign, like, why didn't the Norwegian media understand Trump? Why did. Didn't we cover his electors enough? All these kind of issues. And we, of course, sort of. Do we not understand? Have we not covered them enough? I think we did a decent job on that, to be honest. But it was still some kind of pressure on. Norwegian media don't understand the United States. And so we gathered together a group of foreign editors and also US correspondents, and just to discuss matters openly. How do we see, how do we cover the US and how do we go forward? Of course, we are all independent news organizations, and we will take our own decisions, but it was just an opportunity to be together and share some experiences. And also a lot of the reporters reporting from the frontline of US Politics, they also get a lot of abuse on social media and such. So it's also an opportunity to. To be journalists and editors together and discuss our trade and how to cover the U.S. and honestly, I never thought we would end up there. You know, I am also a Middle east correspondent. We used to get a lot of pressure, but to end up here with the United States, I never thought we would be there, but I don't think anybody imagined it. Yeah, but the United States is obviously in a very deep crisis, and American journalism also in a deep crisis related to the. To the first presidency of Trump and especially what's happening now in 2024.

[Shonette Plato]

John, you were also at this meeting. What did you say? What were your discussions? I know you discussed what you sort of thought you did wrong on the first Trump 1.0 and what you were going to do differently in terms of at least not going for the. What's it. What's the bright shiny object? Oh, no. Bright shiny object. The COVID It was shit. No, no.

[Unknown Speaker]

Flood the zone.

[Shonette Plato]

Flood the zone with shit.

[Jim Acosta]

Flood the zone with shit.

[Shonette Plato]

Flood the zone with shit. In terms of so much. So much stuff coming in, what were your discussions on that and how are you going to do it differently? Was your.

[G]

I think he's flooding the zone a lot more now, isn't he? Yeah, I mean, now we see what he's probably tried to do the first time but didn't. He couldn't do it. But we talked about putting things in context, as Amun said. We talked about what do we report and what do we not report. And this is quite difficult because he has a talent of getting on the agenda. He has a talent on when he says something, when he uses Truth Social, it's difficult not to report it. I mean, even if it's crazy. I mean, Gaza was mentioned. Greenland. Do we not mention it? That's impossible. But the question is, how do we write about it? And as Amun said, we have to explain. We have to explain what is international law in Gaza, what is a sovereign country in Denmark and Greenland. So this is how we have to do it. But I think it's very hard and it's actually getting harder.

[Shonette Plato]

Jim, could anything like that happen in the States? Several media going together like that and discussing how are we going to cover Trump? Is that happening?

[Jim Acosta]

No, it is happening. And that's why we have the White House Correspondence Association. They meet behind closed doors and try to figure out how to cover these sorts of things. And then inside the individual newsrooms, there are also these debates going on. How much is enough coverage? Are you covering it too much? I almost felt like in how you were talking about this earlier, that perhaps you had gotten some complaints from Norwegians saying you're covering Donald Trump too much. Because that's something that I hear from time to time. Don't cover him, don't put him on tv, don't cover his tweets. And it's sort of like, well, we can't ignore him. Look what's happening to the world.

[Shonette Plato]

So good you spoke a little bit about, you know, we saw it here. Elon Musk, I'm not going to do it because that'll be the picture. But with the arm gesture, put it that way, how did you go about covering that? That's a concrete example.

[Unknown Speaker]

It's a good example of the challenges that this administration and his entourage is posing to journalism. Because in a sense, it's sort of a gesture, a quote comes within a context, comes within a certain atmosphere. And also during live coverage of a huge event. This was the inauguration of the new president. Everyone really wanted to know or wonder what was going to happen. And then all of a sudden he makes this gesture that looks awfully lot like a Nazi gesture. And we saw it here again. And I, I think seeing it again now, it looks very much by design and something that he had thought out on beforehand. But it was not that easy to say during this whole show that he put up because it seemed very uncoordinated. So we had to cover that as a running news story. There was a lot of pressure on social media immediately to say, why don't you cover it like this? Why don't you do that? Some people thought it was too much, saying it was an innocent gesture, et cetera, et cetera. So I think that the big challenge is that everyone has already formed an opinion, and then we as news reporters run after the event in a sense, and people want a conclusion from us. And I think that's a really difficult territory because if we conclude, then you also become vulnerable as news reporter. We have to try to report on reality, but. And not portray it like we think it is, but really try to connect to reality. That's difficult with a president like Trump who puts us in a tumble dryer by design. Now, that's their way of operating.

[Jim Acosta]

I do want to ask a question. How many people here thought that was a Nazi salute.

[Shonette Plato]

We can't see that.

[Jim Acosta]

A lot of hands going up in the audience. I mean, that's the problem, is that the press is so under attack, not only in the United States, but around the world, that we as journalists are concerned about our own well being and just reporting. What reality is that if we report what we see, we'll be under attack. And I think that right there is a perfect example of why the press has to support one another, why news organizations have to have each other's back.

[Shonette Plato]

Absolutely. And it's also an example, I think, of the concept of balance. I mean, we're trained to look at something from both sides, to not have a strong opinion about something, to do, you know, fairly neutral observation on what the situation is. But, Amin, I mean, can we even cover Trump the way we usually cover normal stories? Because it seems as if he spins it back at us if we try to balance out the Elon Musk saying, well, maybe it isn't, maybe it isn't. We, maybe we're covering it up. Maybe we're doing it too gently so that we don't get the truth across any longer.

[Unknown Speaker]

Yeah. And it's a question what is normal in journalism? Also, we're discussing this, covering Ukraine war, Gaza war. We all have deeply within ourselves different opinions, and it's with us as reporters, but it needs to be true whatever we cover. And I really, really just think we have to say that this looks like a Nazi salute and this is what, when Hitler did it, it was bad. It's a challenge. But for us, I saw a lot in the beginning of Trump won. We had a lot of negative stories towards him. And we got criticized that we didn't understand the Trump voters enough. And then I felt that all Norwegian journalists went to the countryside of the US and interviewed people on the countryside, Trump supporters, for many, many years. And it almost tipped a bit the other way. Now, for example, I would like to see what is the opposition in the US Doing, what kind of groups are gathering up to try to challenge Trump? Because these people are also in the US it's not just his supporters. So I feel that going forward, this should also be something that journalists should dive into.

[Shonette Plato]

Jim, you know, Signalgate is in many ways an example of the journalistic system that we've all been trained to do. That doesn't work any longer in the sense that, you know, the editor of the Atlantic says, you know, this, and this has happened. Hegset goes out and says, he's lying, he's awful. I Can't remember the adjectives he used, but he's a bastard or whatever. And then finally, the Atlantic editor, he goes, all right, well, I'll show everybody what was actually in those what app messages. And yet nobody has to go. I mean, they've been caught out lying. They've been caught. Somebody should go, but nobody's going. So it seems as if journalism isn't functioning the way it used to function.

[Jim Acosta]

Yeah. I do think what's interesting about Jeffrey Goldberg in the Atlantic with signalgate, is that Jeffrey Goldberg, of all the people on the Signal chat, was probably the most responsible person on the Signal chat, and the way he handled that honestly. And, you know, as journalists, we know about Signal all too well, because during the first days of the Trump administration, many of them, the sources that work for Donald Trump, wanted to talk to us over Signal. They didn't want to get caught just texting because they were concerned that their texts would not be secure. So they chose to communicate with us via Signal to tell us what was going on inside the White House and inside the administration. So it's interesting to see that whole situation come around full circle. But I do think that what Jeffrey did over at the Atlantic was perfect because it illustrates a huge problem in that when you try to report the news, you report reality, you get called fake news, you get called the enemy of the people, and then, lo and behold, the story ends up being true.

[Shonette Plato]

Yeah. What are your thoughts, Sigurd, on? Or I can get to John first.

[G]

There's one more, I think, within Single Gate. I think, because for Trump, it's very important to be the one who sets the agenda. And this is an example where he didn't. But it didn't take long before he was started talking about a third term. So taking back the agenda, that is very important for him, I think. So signalgate is a very good example.

[Shonette Plato]

First of all, Sigurd, how do you see the way forward when journalism, in a way, isn't. They're not playing by the same rules as we have been playing.

[Unknown Speaker]

I think there is a difference. I mean, we are foreign media. We're there to cover what's going on in the United States. In a sense, it's not our fight. It would be a different story if this was happening here in Norway. So we look into it, but we're also very much affected by it. And especially you see that on social media, which is now a global media industry that surpasses borders, it surpasses party lines. And it is also, for us, it's A big challenge. And the contract, I think, for journalists is also that there are somebody responsible on the other side, that there's a certain, there's a mutual respect. And it's been very disheartening to see how American democracy and media have descended with Trump. And getting into these kind of fights and discussions, I think is very unhealthy for the media, for democracy and for the presidency. But that's where the United States is right now. And I think it sets a very bad example for the rest of the world. I think it was difficult before in many countries to report freely. It's more and more difficult. I, as a Middle east reporter, know that kind of feeling when you walk into a meeting with the president. Nobody would ask open question like you could with the American president before, you know, so that it is, I think it's very, very alarming and deeply distressing what's happening to democracy and to press freedom in the United States.

[Jim Acosta]

And I think he wants, Trump wants a situation that is more like what goes on in dictatorships, where the press is sort of there as a mouthpiece, as the house organ, as sort of a tool of the administration to ask the questions that they want asked so the dictator can get the question out, get the message out that he wants to get out. And I think that that is the problem that we're up against if he can succeed in that fashion.

[Unknown Speaker]

But if I can say one thing that I think is extremely important for us as foreign media and Norwegian broadcasting is to get out in the United States and do reporting, meet people. What's really happening, what are the consequences of its policies and continue and really clinging to essence of our craft and not buy into that media world that he wants us to be in, but seeing real consequences, meeting people and really taking what he's saying for serious. We did that with Gaza and his social media or his IA video. We actually sent out a team in Gaza. What do you think about this? You know, people not having any homes anymore and living, you know, on the streets in a bombed out town. That way of connecting always with reality. What he's saying, I think that's crucially important. In addition to what we're saying, just keep reporting facts, try to explain what's going on and so not give an inch on where they want to push us.

Yeah. Just to double down on exactly that point. You know, when the fight in the White House between Zelensky and Trump and J.D. vance happened, you know, our team was going to Kyiv and we tried to go out to the mines on where the minerals are. We tried to always connect to people in Gaza right after this. So Trump is always there in any war we're covering, any story we're covering, but we're trying to also find what's the people on the ground, how are they affected by this political drama? For example, we have spent a lot of time trying to reach people in that town in northern Yemen where the bombs were hitting that night, when we really believed in the newsroom that we needed to show those injured kids that the American bombs hit the houses and when they were sleeping. So this is so important because without it, we're nothing.

[Shonette Plato]

Are any of you experiences, any sources that are now afraid to speak negatively about Trump from any of your reporters out there, or are you experiencing it? Amen in any way?

[Jim Acosta]

No.

[Unknown Speaker]

All I can say is that it's more and more difficult for our reporters in the United States to get people to speak openly. It's become a very difficult job to get out there and report on American reality, which is also something I never thought I would say.

[Shonette Plato]

Are you receiving any threats of any sort?

[Jim Acosta]

Oh, goodness. Well, I don't talk to them. I don't talk about them very much. But I will say just a couple of weekends ago, yes, I received a threat. I haven't talked about this publicly, but on X, somebody wrote an article and posted it that said I'd been executed. And it described this whole scene of my execution, and it was all just fictional. Obviously, I'm standing here right now speaking with you, but I reported the post to X. I never got a response. I thought for sure they would take it down. Did not get a response from X. I thought they would take it down. To my knowledge, it's still there. Fortunately, the person who put this out doesn't have a great deal of followers, but it was picked up by a number of other people who was, who were following this individual. Now, whether it was bots or I don't know, I have no idea. But this continues to happen, not just to me, but to other journalists in America. There's no question about it. And it's all because of this cult following that Trump has back in the United States. People are very committed to him, committed to his agenda, his vision for the future of the United States. And if you get in the way and ask questions they don't like, you're going to be attacked.

[Shonette Plato]

I'd like to move over to another part of this discussion, which I think is quite important. And, Jim, in one of your recent podcasts, you spoke To Michael Cohen, the lawyer, he spoke of that we live in Kardashian Times. And I think he meant by that a Times time where we're all very entertained. We like to be entertained by reality tv, where there are, you know, it's clickbait, it's reality drama, content centered on conflicts and personalities that dominate. Much of this is stuff that Trump knows how to play. You know, he knows how to work the news. And some critics have said, said that the American mainstream media have let the American public down by going into this clickbait, that they are feeding off this clickbait because they want readers to click as well. So they're sort of feeding the monster by going along the same road. What do you think about that?

[Jim Acosta]

I guess that might be true to some extent. I mean, there's a huge market for that kind of information. I wouldn't call it journalism, but information in the United States, but also happens around the world. You see the British tabloids and so on, they're infamous for that sort of thing. But at the same time, we do have a lot of really dedicated journalists out there putting their lives on the line, going into some very dangerous places, trying to bring information to the public. I mean, I will say one of the lines of attack that you hear from people who talk about this Kardashian style of journalism, as if American journalists aren't doing serious reporting. I mean, I will tell you, in the final weeks before the 2024 election, I had experts on, on my show who were experts in authoritarianism. People like Timothy Snyder, the professor from Yale, people like Ruth Ben Guy, people like Anne Applebaum, who writes for the Atlantic. She understands authoritarianism very well. And we were having some very frank discussions about what Trump might bring to the country if he's reelected to a second term, that he might try to bring sort of an American style authoritarianism to the United States. And one of the messages that, and this goes back to going out to the country and talking to Trump supporters and so on. I mean, one of the lessons that I took away from those conversations is that a reason why fascism can take hold in a civilized and formed society is because in some cases, it works with some people. And it's difficult to hear that that ultra nationalism works with some people, but it just does if you listen to experts on authoritarianism. So it's something that we have to be mindful of. And it's one of the reasons why what we do is so vitally important. As you guys have been saying all along, information, data analysis, facts, the press has to be laser focused on all of those things to make sure people are still getting reliable, trusted information.

[Shonette Plato]

But we're all media here struggling to get our viewers, readers, listeners right. We know we need to get people in. How difficult is that with some of the cases that we see with Trump where it's easy to go into the big headlines? You spoke a little bit about it, Armin, but I see you're nodding up.

[Unknown Speaker]

I think. I mean, it's very difficult to compare Norway. It's a small democracy, 5 million people with the US is a huge superpower with a very varied population. But Norwegian media has something that's really the essence and the most valuable thing we have, which is basically a trust between us and the audience, which very many American media lack for various reasons. And I think for us, it's the most important thing to try to, as best we can, to preserve that trust. And I think we do it with open and honest reporting, reporting facts and not taking sides, but really, but without going into a sort of a passive, just describing mode either, but trying to strike that balance between handling and seeing the reality for what it is, but still being perceived and reporting in an honest and proper way. And I think, I mean, for Norwegian democracy and for the Norwegian public political debate, I think that trust is absolutely essential.

[Shonette Plato]

But what we see in the States is that the media are so split. It's quite obvious what Fox means, it's quite obvious what New York Times means. They're quite split also in the way that they're reporting on Trump. Are there any fears, even though here in Norway we're a very small democracy? Is there a fear if we cover Trump too much as a conflict that we could shove people away? I mean.

[Unknown Speaker]

I think that to a certain extent, I mean, we have serious media organizations, we are public broadcasters, so we have a special mission on keeping the audience together from all sides. And of course, private media can do it a little bit differently. But in the essence, we have big media organizations that more or less see reporting in the world in the same way, which is extremely important. But you can see the tendencies in the UK or in France, where you get these kind of news information channels that are bought up by right wing organizations and they push the narrative. And it's not as successful as Fox has been in the United States, but you can see that it is changing and is posing a challenge to, to French and British democracies and how the public change of opinion works. So, yes, it's still there and maybe Norway as well, but we have strong media here.

[G]

I think it's very important that we show the consequences. It's not a soap opera, it's actual people here. So when the USAID gets no money, then people actually die. The consequences is what we first of all should show. I think the political game we can show, but the most important is the consequences.

[Unknown Speaker]

But I also have to be honest that it gives a lot of clicks still. The Norwegian public are thirsty for the drama and thirsty for musk and Trump. And we see it on our webpage that so far, we're now in April, there are not tired yet. And I mean, there's still three and a half years at least. But it's really. And we see that it's tempting to build up the drama and to give the drama to the readers. So it's a real, real dilemma that we need to take seriously, because it has consequences, what we do and what we write.

[Shonette Plato]

And I think we feel it all as journalists trying to keep onto our readers and trying to keep onto the importance of journalism. I think maybe we can open up. We have a few minutes left for just any questions. I can't see a thing, so I have no idea if anybody's got a question. Can you see anything?

[Jim Acosta]

Nobody has a question.

[Shonette Plato]

Come on now. Does anybody have a question?

[Jim Acosta]

They're such nice people. They're very polite. Nobody wants to.

[Shonette Plato]

That's impossible.

[Jim Acosta]

Come on. I have a question. I have a question for the audience.

[Shonette Plato]

All right.

[Jim Acosta]

What would the world be like in Norway if you did have a Fox operating in Norway? What would that be like here? Would that dramatically change things, do you think? For example, when Trump gave his speech to the joint session of Congress a couple of weeks ago, Fox had the largest audience of all the networks. I'm curious what Norwegians think about that.

[Unknown Speaker]

If I can give a parallel to that, because I was thinking about that with the French politics. When Marine Le Pen was convicted and not being able to stand for election, at least until her appeal is decided, how quickly that went from. It took two minutes before everyone started speaking about politics. Is it fair? Is it not fair? Are they treated differently? And that's the classical far right narrative that Trump also uses all the time. You pull attention away from the case itself, which was very serious. And yes, there are things to discuss, but the focus is immediately removed from the essence of the case till the politics.

[Shonette Plato]

And then, of course, reality drama, it's the conflicts.

[Unknown Speaker]

And of course, on political TV shows, you can talk and talk and talk and talk, but it doesn't really bring the case forward or honestly enlightening very much where in this case French politics is going forward. And that's what you see in the US all the time. It's never about the case. It's always about what surrounds it and how it plays out in the media.

[Shonette Plato]

And he dodged your question about Fox.

[Unknown Speaker]

News because in this we. Answer the question, please.

[Jim Acosta]

No, because the reason why I ask is this is my sense of Norwegian media is that it's very much like the pre Fox era in the United States. Maybe I'm wrong about that, but I.

[Unknown Speaker]

Think we would manage. I think we would manage. Of course we would manage and we have good examples of how to do it from the American media. So, I mean, we are up for the challenge.

[Jim Acosta]

But what would it do to people at home? Because, you know, in the United States you have a very large senior citizen population. They're sitting at home, they've got their remote control in their hand, they're watching Fox all day long. It's being pumped into their heads that Donald Trump is great. Anything that the Democrats do is bad.

[G]

Split the society, I guess.

[Shonette Plato]

And we have a question here.

[Jim Acosta]

It would split society. Oh, here we have a question.

[Shonette Plato]

Thank you very much for a very interesting discussion. My name is Rang, previously a journalist, now I'm working with the Norwegian equivalent to usaid, among other things, working with support to journalism in the global South. And my question is to John Acosta. I'm wondering, Sigurd was mentioning something that sounds like a growing self censorship in the public. I'm just wondering whether you can see that also among journalists and responsible journalists than in the U.S. thanks.

[Jim Acosta]

Yeah, I mean, that's one of the things that I'm really concerned about at this point with these large media companies settling these lawsuits or tempted to settle lawsuits with Donald Trump. The question has to be asked, what happens inside the newsrooms that are owned by these large companies. Do you have executives in those newsrooms saying, well, you know, we better be careful about covering Elon Musk at the inauguration and the hand gesture that he made because we don't want to piss off the White House. Those kinds of, I will tell you just very frankly, those kind of conversations are absolutely happening. There's no question about it. And you mentioned usaid. I mean, talk about a program that for years and years, say what you want about the United States was an example of soft power around the world. It was some of the best advertising for the United States that America had around the world. And for Trump to smash that the way he's smashing Everything else obviously gives the United States a black eye. But it goes back to what you were saying earlier, is that there are going to be real consequences. I was at a dinner just recently with somebody who was pretty high up in usaid, was very distraught over the fact that the agency was being shut down. And they were very worried about what's going to happen in places like Africa, where HIV has really been knocked down to a large degree because of the efforts of the PEPFAR program, the AIDS program that George W. Bush got passed when he was president and the efforts of people at usaid. So, I mean, it's just one of the many scary things that are happening right now. But I do try to remind people from time to time, and this goes back to you were saying, what about the political opposition back in the United States? I mean, you're already starting to see elections take place in the United States. You're seeing an opposition movement growing in the United States to push back against Donald Trump. And so people around the world who are concerned about what's taking place in America need to understand that that is also taking place in the United States. You know, Winston Churchill, I mean, it was, it was ascribed to him as a quote he said. I'm not sure it was exactly something he said, but he said that people in the United States tend to do the right thing after exhausting all other options. And that may be what we're in the process of doing right now. Let's hope.

[Shonette Plato]

Any more questions?

[Jim Acosta]

Yeah, I have one question, Jim. I really love to talk. The way you feel about Trump is the way I feel about Shinzo Abe in Japan. He ruled for eight years and he kind of decimated the Japanese press. My question is, in the United States.

[Unknown Speaker]

You have Nonprofit journalism like ProPublica.

[Jim Acosta]

What is your opinion of that?

[Unknown Speaker]

And do you think that that is a way forward for that to become.

[Jim Acosta]

A dominant media strategy of pushing the truth out? Jake. And by the way, Jake, great to see you. Great hanging out with you all day today. I think the emergence of organizations like ProPublica is a very healthy development in the United States for people here who don't know what ProPublica is. It's a non profit news organization that's just gotten to a point where I think people are starting to really understand who they are and what they do back in America. And just recently they broke some stories about the Supreme Court where they found out that Clarence Thomas, one of the longtime justices on the Supreme Court, was getting taken on all these expensive trips care of this rich billionaire back in the United States. And it raised all sorts of questions about conflicts of interest and whether justices should be able to do that. No, they should not. But if it were not for the efforts of ProPublica, we would not know about that. And what you're starting to see take hold in the United states is when ProPublica breaks a big story like that, then you have sort of an aura of credibility around them. And so when they break another story, all the networks, all the newspapers feel pretty confident saying, here's another story from ProPublica. So I think that is, I mean, one of the things I didn't get to talk about today and I'll talk about right now is the emergence of independent media, nonprofit media in the United States is one of the healthiest developments we've had in a very long time because it puts the corporate owned media on notice that there are other players in the game now.

[Shonette Plato]

And there are several previous anchors like yourself that are now on substack.

[Jim Acosta]

On Substack, people like Don Lemon, Joy Reid, people who were at some of these bigger companies left under various circumstances and now they're on substack, growing their audiences there, as well as other journalists that maybe did not have the same kind of exposure on other platforms. They moved over to Substack and they're seeing what they're doing there, really take off. So I understand it's kind of a new thing in Norway, but I encourage people to check it out because it's an interesting development so far.

[Shonette Plato]

I think the most famous one is Hjette Lirolnas, who's now gone over to Substack. So, yeah, so we'll see what happens there. All right. I think we're going to end it there. Thank you very much to Sigur Aman Yun and Jay mcosta. Thank you.

[Jim Acosta]

Nice to talk to you. Nice to talk to you. Nice to talk to you. That was great. That was great. Thank you. That was great. Thank you so much.