The obnoxious host’s career is circling the drain

Jim Acosta may soon be out of a job at CNN and begging for a new one at MSNBC, the only network likely to put up with his self-righteous preening these next four years with Donald Trump as president. The notoriously obnoxious host, best known for making a scene at press conferences during the first Trump administration, is reportedly threatening to quit after CNN asked him to accept a humiliating demotion by moving his weekday show, CNN Newsroom with Jim Acosta, from 10 a.m. to the “graveyard shift” between midnight at 2 a.m.

CNN executives have even offered to move Acosta to Los Angeles so he can live in the Pacific Time Zone. They’ve pitched the idea by noting that midnight on the East Coast is primetime (9 p.m.) on the West Coast and suggesting that CNN is more than just “an Acela corridor network.” (It’s not.) Acosta wasn’t thrilled about the new time slot, which remains the subject of “active discussions,” according to a network spokesman. The host ended his show on Wednesday with a defiant sign-off: “Still reporting from Washington, I’m Jim Acosta.” The Los Angeles Times reported this week that Acosta may leave the network rather than accept the embarrassing reassignment. One CNN insider told Fox News the graveyard shift is Acosta’s only option if he wants to stay. “He could have a real slot, but the choice is to not give him one,” the insider said.

CNN is in the midst of a major restructuring to cut costs and restore what’s left of its credibility. In the days since Trump was sworn in, CEO Mark Thompson has announced hundreds of layoffs and advised network personalities to be “fair-minded” when covering Trump and to avoid “expressing outrage” on air. That sounds reasonable enough, but for Acosta, that would mean tarnishing his carefully cultivated reputation—he’s still popular amongst a handful of #Resistance grannies—as the smuggest, angriest, most partisan hack who doesn’t work at MSNBC. Before getting his own show at CNN in 2021, Acosta was a roving correspondent best known for shouting obnoxious questions and wrestling with aides who tried to take his microphone away. He wrote a book about how “dangerous” it was to “tell the truth in America.”

The most likely explanation is that CNN’s “reassignment offer” is just a polite way of asking Acosta to quit. It would be far too humiliating for him to accept. Still, it’s hard to believe that Acosta has any better offers on the table. What’s he going to do, exactly? Start a podcast? Become a humor columnist for Jennifer Rubin’s new “democracy” website, the Contrarian? MSNBC is being spun off into a separate entity later this year and is doing a major restructuring of its own. They probably won’t have the money to pay Acosta what he thinks he deserves, but they might let him fill in for Rachel Maddow every now and then.

Both networks have seen their ratings plummet since Trump’s election, but CNN has suffered the most. CNN averaged just 379,000 total daytime viewers for the week of Jan. 13. Just 66,000 of those viewers were under the age of 55, down from 107,000 in January 2023. If Acosta actually accepts the midnight time slot, the only people watching will be dementia patients whose home health aides forgot to turn off the television. For now, anyway, Acosta continues to carry the flame of the anti-Trump #Resistance. “This is not Fox [News],” he huffed smugly during a testy exchange with Rep. Tim Burchett (R., Tenn.). “You can’t just spin a tale and pull the wool over people’s eyes. This is CNN. This is the news.”

Burchett’s comeback was as devastating as it was accurate. “And that’s why more people are watching the Cartoon Network, SpongeBob reruns right now, Jim,” the congressman said.