Jim Acosta and the Laziness of Elite Opinion

By Rich Lowry

Sunday, May 19, 2024

 

Jim Acosta, you might have heard, is a newsman with a news network, and not just any news network, but a very serious news network.

 

On his show on Friday, he blasted Kansas City Chiefs kicker Harrison Butker for his controversial commencement address, which is to be expected. What was particularly notable, though, was the contrast with Bill Maher, who, on his own show the same day, accurately quoted Butker’s remarks and said he didn’t see what’s “the big crime.”

 

It’s a symptom of our time that the outrageous progressive comedian is more reasonable and thoughtful than the purportedly straight news guy.

 

Now, of course, Maher has become quite heterodox in recent years and is, in some respects, an anti-left progressive, or an anti-left left-leaning libertarian (a counterintuitive category that loosely includes the likes of Glenn Greenwald, John Fetterman, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr.). It’s still remarkable that the entertainer is capable of more nuance than someone who very earnestly follows the news for a living and, heck, even anchors a program called “CNN Newsroom with Jim Acosta.”

 

The fact is that being a newsperson in the mold of Jim Acosta means never saying or thinking anything new.

 

His take on Harrison Butker was simply conventional wisdom taken up a notch or two to try to create some interest.

 

Acosta told his guest, a sports journalist who predictably agreed with pretty much everything he said, that what Butker said was “unbelievable” and “insane.”

 

There are reasonable critiques of the content of Butker’s remarks and the way he expressed his point. In no way did he say anything “insane.” That makes it sound as if he called on women to wear burkas or approved of the destruction of the Buddhas of Bamiyan.

 

Acosta’s outrage at Butker’s endorsement of the validity and worth of mothers deciding to stay at home with their kids makes it sound like the anchor has never met a stay-at-home mother, or at least never one he respected.

 

That it would apparently be news to Acosta — real, breaking news — that millions of mothers find satisfaction in staying with their kids and believe that they’re making an invaluable contribution to their families and society speaks to how sociologically and ideologically blinkered he is.

 

Acosta might imagine himself a sophisticated man of the world, but he is really by, of, and for the CNN Newsroom, just as the name of his show suggests. The range of opinion in that operation surely runs the gamut all the way from the almost invariably conventional to the completely, unwaveringly conventional.

 

Naturally, Acosta also brought up Colin Kaepernick. He decried the supposed double standard that saw the former 49ers quarterback bounced from the league while the NFL has only distanced itself from Butker. Acosta complained, “Harrison Butker gives this speech, goes wide right, so to speak. And, and, the NFL says, ‘Well, you know he was on his day off when he gave this speech. No big deal.’ I’m sorry, what?”

 

Well, as a matter of fact, Kaepernick was taking a knee while he was on the job, whereas Butker really was talking in his private capacity at an event that had nothing to do with the NFL.

 

Another difference is that by the time Kapernick was getting “banned,” as Acosta puts it, he was in decline, while Butker is one of the best kickers in the game.

 

NewsBusters reminds us that Kaepernick was getting benched prior to his protests. NFL.com described the quarterback this way prior to Week 9 in November 2025: “Kaepernick is a clearly regressing quarterback who has struggled not only with the rudimentary passing elements such as accuracy, anticipation and touch, but also with protections, field vision and decision making. His startling lack of field vision and awareness in Week 8 was perhaps the last straw.”

 

If Acosta was suggesting that Butker should get canceled, by the way, that makes him more radical on the question than Sara Haines of The View, who accused Butker of basically being part of a cult but stipulated that it was his right to speak his mind. And, again, she’s the opinion host on perhaps the most absurd show on television, and he’s the newsman.

 

Acosta reflects a journalistic ethic that is less about “all the news that’s fit to print” and more about “all the news that conforms to the worldview of the self-important people delivering the news.”