Thread by @JewhadiTM

It’s no such thing

Ted Olson, CNN’s lawyer on the Acosta lawsuit: This is an important First Amendment case hotair.com/archives/2018/…

“While the suit is specific to @CNN and @Acosta, this could have happened to anyone,” CNN claimed this morning in its statement about the suit.

Not really.

The fact that Acosta doesn’t behave like anyone else at press conferences isn’t lost on the audience, including his own colleagues in the industry.

If Acosta had had his “hard pass” stripped simply because Trump didn’t like the tone of his questions, then it “could have happened to anyone.”

The reason it happened to him is because he’s disruptive and unprofessional, talking over reporters and insisting on having his say when dozens of others are waiting their turn.

Probably 90 percent of the people in the room on any given day are anti-Trump and Trump knows it; he’s even singled out some, like April Ryan, for their overt opposition to him. Yet only one person has been sanctioned by losing his hard pass. How come?

One, as noted, is that grounds exist for excluding Acosta irrespective of his viewpoint, and viewpoint is what the First Amendment is usually concerned with.

We don’t want to let the government punish people for their viewpoints even if the “punishment” is as meager as revoking access to which the reporter never had a right to begin with, otherwise the proverbial slope might get slippery.

But practically everyone in the press corps shares Acosta’s viewpoint about Trump. Dozens of people at the same anti-Trump news outfit he works for continue to enjoy their “hard passes.”

He was singled out because he’s disruptive. Why shouldn’t someone be penalized by losing a privilege for repeatedly refusing to observe the same rules of order and collegiality that everyone else does?

CNN winning would mean there’s a First Amendment right to commandeer a presidential press conference for your own douchey grandstanding needs.

And, intentionally or not, it would hold up Acosta as the archetype of how reporters should behave. That’s the other thing that irks me. CNN would deny that it’s doing that but the conclusion is inescapable given how the network has handled him.

They could have rotated Acosta off the White House beat voluntarily ages ago.

They kept him in the role because they enjoy the Acosta Show and now, rather than hand Trump a win by replacing him very belatedly, they’re going to try to turn him into a cause celebre by filing a big #1A lawsuit replete with super-lawyer Ted Olson’s participation.

It’s the ultimate illustration of Jon Stewart’s point about the media getting sucked into personal battles with Trump.

Instead of showing some introspection about how Acosta was mishandling a serious job and sending a less vain, more issue-minded reporter to do it, CNN left him out there until he ended up in a pointless yet completely foreseeable confrontation with the president.

The entire Acosta saga has been a tale of journalism as Resistance showboating instead of journalism, and never more so than now.

The leading precedent on this issue finds that the government can’t revoke a press pass absent a “compelling” state interest.

The government shouldn’t need a “compelling” interest to justify canceling an access privilege to which a reporter has no right, though, certainly not where the cancellation isn’t based on viewpoint.

A rational interest would be better. Does the White House have a “compelling” interest in barring a disruptive reporter from the briefing? No, not really. Does it have a rational interest in wanting the briefings to run efficiently? Sure. We’ll see what the Supremes say.

More explanation... patterico.com/2018/11/13/cnn…

“The legal grounds for the lawsuit?

CNN said it is seeking a preliminary injunction as soon as possible so that Acosta can return to the White House right away, and a ruling from the court preventing the White House from revoking Acosta’s pass in the future.”

“CNN filed a lawsuit against the Trump Administration this morning in DC District Court,” the statement read. “It demands the return of the White House credentials of CNN’s Chief White House correspondent, Jim Acosta.”

”The wrongful revocation of these credentials violates CNN and Acosta’s First Amendment rights of freedom of the press, and their Fifth Amendment rights to due process.”

“We have asked this court for an immediate restraining order requiring the pass be returned to Jim, and will seek permanent relief as part of this process.”

“Here is the legal analysis I would like to be able to give:

LOL no.

Give up the mic next time you’ve asked your question, Jimmy.

They might have given the credentials back after a while before this. Now, I think Acosta is gone for good.”