CNN’s Jim Acosta Tells Mediaite Why a Second Trump Term Would Be Dangerous For The Press

Jim Acosta, CNN anchor and chief domestic correspondent, is steeling himself for the possibility of a second Trump term. After all, he still occasionally faces death threats thanks to his time covering the first Donald Trump administration, when his high-profile clashes with the president and his officials catapulted him to fame, earning him critics and admirers with equal ferocity. Things got so intense he considered moving his kids out of the United States.

Now, Acosta is the anchor of the 10 a.m. hour on CNN, where he covers breaking news from the 2024 election to the Israel-Hamas war and the Biden administration. From his perch as an anchor, he continues to describe Trump and his movement in blunt terms.

“We have to cover how he poses a threat to American democracy and he is in command of an extremist movement in this country,” Acosta said on this week’s edition of Press Club. “I was tackling that throughout his administration, when he was calling the press the enemy of the people and so on, and it made people a little bit uncomfortable at times. But I think current events have sort of borne out the approach, which is you’ve got to be tough. I try to tell folks I work with, ‘Don’t go left, don’t go right, go tough,’ and I think that’s what the viewers expect.”

Being tough applies to the current president as well as his predecessor, Acosta said. “Right now, if you look at the way the president is handling Israel and Gaza, that’s getting a whole lot of coverage, and it hasn’t always been glowing coverage. That’s just doing the news.”

In a wide-ranging conversation, Acosta spoke about his time covering Trump from the briefing room, how the media should cover the former president, his movement, President Joe Biden’s re-election prospects, CNN’s new boss, and the future of cable news.

Subscribe to Press Club on YouTube, Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Read a transcript of the conversation below, edited for length and clarity.

Aidan McLaughlin: Until recently, you were weekend anchor at CNN. You occupied this vast swath of programming across Saturday and Sunday. Your ratings were strong. You often beat Fox News in the demo. So I think it was only a matter of time before they moved you to weekdays. You’re now anchoring five days a week at 10 a.m. EST. Tell us about the new show.

Jim Acosta: Well, you know, I think the new show is very much like the show I was doing on the weekends. We’re doing the news and what I hope to bring from the weekend edition to this show is the longer conversations, trying to take a little bit of extra time to dig into stuff, and that’s tough to do in a one-hour newscast, so sometimes time is a little tight, but I’m trying to infuse some of that into the weekday show. I think by the time 10 in the morning, mid-morning rolls around, people are kind of ready. They’ve gotten their news of the day and they’re wanting to sit down, I think, and maybe listen to a slightly more in-depth discussion about things. So hoping to do that. Of course, we’ll continue to cover politics and everything else under the sun, and it’s been a very busy year so far, and I expect it’s going to stay that way.

It’s an interesting time because you’re coming off the morning shows, which can be chattier, and the news of the day is starting to get locked in. But you can also take a step back and look at the news that morning and dive into it deeply.

Yeah, and we’re going to do a lot of breaking news too. I mean, it’s been almost nonstop breaking news and so there are some days it’s 9:30 in the morning and, you can appreciate this, sometimes we just have to tear up the rundown and just, here we go. You know? There’s a Trump hearing, there’s a congressional hearing, and you just have to throw everything out the window, and that makes it fun too.

Is the pace totally different? Are you waking up way earlier? How has it changed from dealing with the news cycle on the weekend?

My body clock is still catching up. I think it still wants to be on weekend time, which is a lot of fun time during the week, don’t tell my bosses, but anyway. No, one of the big adjustments is, with the weekend thing, we had so many hours, as you mentioned, it felt like 500 hours every weekend, but it gave us a lot of extra time to do a whole range of issues. With this show, we really have to get to the heart of things and just do the main news topics of the day and there going to be some things that we don’t cover. And I try to tell my team, “Hey, we’re on a 24 hour news network. The next show or the one after that may cover this thing that we’re not going to get to.” But yeah, that’s the big adjustment I think, is just not having as much time. But I also think because it is a highly visible part of our viewing schedule, sometimes the hour that I’m doing, the hours that Wolf and I are doing in that mid-morning range, sometimes that will end up being the highest rated show of the day on CNN, according to the key demographic, and so that means a lot of people are watching, and so that kind of gets our creative juices going in a different fashion. You know, we got to get things to folks quickly and make sure they understand things at their essence a lot faster than I did on the weekends.

I think that you are someone who has a strong view of how the big and thorny issues of the day should be covered. You were a high-profile White House reporter in the Trump administration, and Trump is obviously an issue that has caused news networks a lot of headaches just in terms of how to cover him. Do you think that you learned how to cover Trump perhaps in a way that others in the media might be missing right now?

There are a lot of different ways you can go in answering that. My sense of it was — and this goes back to when I covered him in 2016, all the way through his presidency and up until the 2020 campaign — I mean, obviously, you can’t cover him like a conventional candidate when he’s telling lies and falsehoods and half-truths and whoppers and so on. You gotta call that stuff out, and that is going to infuriate him, it’s going to infuriate the people who adore him, and as journalists we have to sort of put that to the side and say, “You know what? We have to continue to do our jobs.” The thing that I think became more of an issue during his presidency, and has been since January 6, is this question of how much of a threat does he pose to American democracy? And you can have a big conversation about that, you can argue to which degree he poses a threat to American democracy, but if you take a look at what took place on January 6, the things that he has said since then, I mean I don’t think that is really a debate that needs to be settled at this point. I think it’s something that we have to cover. We have to cover how he poses a threat to American democracy and he is in command of an extremist movement in this country. Now I was tackling that throughout his administration, when he was calling the press the enemy of the people and so on, and it made people a little bit uncomfortable at times. But I think current events have sort of borne out the approach, which is you’ve got to be tough. I try to tell folks I work with, “Don’t go left, don’t go right, go tough, be tough,” and I think that’s what the viewers expect. If we were to sort of be wishy-washy and mamby pamby and tiptoe through the tulips and not call things out, people would be furious with us for doing that. So it calls upon us as journalists, and I’m not sitting here on Mount Olympus or anything telling people what I think about how we should cover the news, I’m just one guy doing my show, and I work at a big network, and there’s a collaborative process, obviously, at CNN. I just think that’s the approach that works best.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who’s running as an independent in 2024, suggested that Joe Biden poses a greater threat to democracy than Trump does. What did you make of that comment?

He made that to my colleague, Erin Burnett. I mean, obviously, it’s false, and that’s not taking Joe Biden’s point of view here, that’s not taking the Democratic point of view here. The Cleveland Plain Dealer editor-in-chief over there, who put out an op-ed this past weekend, put it best. If you are to compare these two presidents, you can’t say, “Well they both pose equal threats to American democracy.” You can’t say what Robert F. Kennedy said and say, “Joe Biden, it could be argued, poses a greater threat to American democracy.” I mean, that’s just that’s just false. It’s patently false. You could look at the objective facts without any kind of bias or skew on anything and just say that that’s just not the case. I was there at the White House on January 6, I covered Trump when he was not acting when there was an attack on the Capitol. I was talking to officials inside the White House, inside the administration. They were telling me, via background sourcing, that they were quitting, other people were quitting, and I’ve never written about or really talked about that much, but it is one of the darkest days that I’ve ever witnessed in my career covering the news. I never thought I would see a president of the United States just sit there and not do anything when there are people storming the Capitol and saying they wanted to hang the vice president. That episode in and of itself, his efforts to overturn the 2020 election in Georgia, calling the Georgia Secretary of State and all the other things that were going on, alternate slate of electors, I mean you can go on and on and on about this, but just the actions of that day, objectively speaking, factually speaking, without any bias or skew whatsoever, makes him a greater threat to American democracy than Joe Biden. I mean, that’s just looking at the facts of the matter. That’s not somebody coming in and saying, “Hey, this is this is my point of view here.” That’s just looking at the facts.

Speaking of January 6, in a lot of ways Trump looked done after that happened. You had hosts going on Fox News that had previously defended him saying enough is enough. And of course Lindsey Graham’s meltdown. Do you have any way of explaining how Trump went from that point to now, where he’s the frontrunner to be the next president of the United States?

One of the big stories that we’ve all witnessed since January 6 is the Republican Party has become the party of Trump. I mean, they were the party of Trump before January 6, they had the chance to sort of shed, sort of kick him to the curb, and they just didn’t do it, and that’s not a knock on them. I mean, you could make that a knock on them, I suppose. But they just, factually speaking, they just didn’t do it, and since then he’s gone out and done things like praise January 6 rioters and insurrectionists as hostages, called them hostages, and vowed to pardon them when he gets back into the White House. If he gets back into the White House. I mean, that’s a story. What are you supposed to do, ignore that? You can’t ignore that. It’s sort of like when he goes out on the campaign trail and says that immigrants are poisoning the blood of the country. You can have a whole discussion about that. How do we cover it? It was being reported at the time when he started to do that, and he’s done that since, that that echoes the rhetoric of Adolf Hitler and the Nazis. Now, you might say, well you’re using your opinion there. No, that rhetoric does, if you look at it, echo what Adolf Hitler and the Nazis said, and you could get into an argument as to whether or not you could describe it that way, but I think one of the things that we’ve seen across the board, across multiple brand name news media outlets is just about everybody is is calling it as it is, and I think that’s just fine. Just go ahead and do that. There’s the argument over whether or not you should take the rallies and cover him live, and you can have debates about that too, and to what degree and how much and so on, and I think you have to cover him some. You don’t have to just air it gavel to gavel, but I think the American people need to see what he’s saying, and so what I did on my weekend show, and we do it during the week and other shows do it, other news networks do it, is you show that stuff or you tell people, “This is what he’s saying and this is what it sounds like,” and I think that that’s how you should do it.

So you’re of the approach that the media should not be ignoring the things that Trump is saying. Let’s take, for example, Trump’s election lies. They were obviously a major problem for the media to cover in 2020. Some outlets did it well, some outlets did it poorly, as we saw through a couple defamation suits. Trump shows no signs now of letting up on that rhetoric. I think it’s pretty obvious that we’re going to get a lot of that in 2024. How do you think the media should cover something like that? Is there a right way to do it and a wrong way to do it?

We’ve got the brilliant fact-checker over at CNN, Daniel Dale, and he knows Trump’s lies better than anybody. Maybe better than Trump himself, and he will just matter of factly, sort of clinically point out, “He says this all the time. That’s not true. It’s been corrected. The record’s been corrected so many times, he keeps saying it,” and when that happens, those are lies, and I think you have to cover these things in a very tough way. I think leading up to the 2020 election, you could hear Trump already out there on the campaign trail and in statements even at the White House not committing to a peaceful transfer of power, saying that things were going to be rigged, going off on mail-In balloting, even though he had done that in the past, and so on, and I think you just have to cover that as much as you can with the right balance. I mean, you can’t be just Trump news all the time. I mean, I don’t think people want to see that either. And by the way, if Biden is doing stuff, that needs to be called out. If he’s engaging in kind of political rhetoric that needs to be called out, it’ll get called out. When he talked about undocumented people, unlawful immigrants in this country as “illegals,” that got called out in the press. That wasn’t something that was what swept under the rug or ignored, and right now, if you look at the way the president is handling Israel and Gaza, that’s getting a whole lot of coverage, and it hasn’t always been glowing coverage. That’s just doing the news, you know what I mean? It’s sort of like putting on your socks and brushing your teeth. We’ve got to cover the president. We’ve got to cover the ex-president. What they say matters and we have to be tough about it.

Speaking of Israel and Biden, we’re recording this on Thursday, which was really the first time that you saw at least a threat from the United States of a change in approach there. You’re working with a lot of this breaking news on the war. What’s your approach to covering that?

I mean, honestly, this is one of those situations where I really lean on the expertise of our folks internally at CNN. You know this Aidan, we have some brilliant, absolutely amazing war correspondents, foreign correspondents. If I start naming names, I’m going to leave somebody’s name out and I’m gonna feel terrible about myself. But you know the names, you know who they are, and they just do a marvelous job, and in addition to that, we have terrific editors in London and all over the world who make sure that we’re all covering things as accurately and as fairly as well as we can. And I really just lean on that as much as possible and bring on a variety of experts from a variety of different angles to cover this, and I think this is one of the situations where you do really have to bend over backwards and strain as much as possible your journalistic muscles to cover this in a just very even keeled kind of way because the passions are so fired up on both sides, and I think it’s perfectly legitimate for the press to be asking questions about how President Biden has handled the situation in Gaza. Whether or not he trusted Prime Minister Netanyahu maybe a little too much in the way he was conducting all of this. I do think the president would be well served, and I’m not here to give any advice, to get out there and give a news conference and talk about this, because I do think there are some really serious questions to be asked. So I think we’ll probably see that in the coming days. I think he knows after this strike on those World Central Kitchen aid workers that people are really asking serious questions and they’re being asked inside the Democratic Party. You talk to people inside the Democratic Party and there are a lot of folks who are really upset about this from the Obama administration. Ben Rhodes has been on Twitter, Jon Favreau, other figures of the Obama administration have been raising questions. “What is going on here? Why is this happening?” And I was talking about this on my show today. These margins are so tight, there’s a CNN poll of polls right now that Biden and Trump are 48-48%. You look at these battleground states, you could conceivably see a situation where 5000 votes in Michigan means Trump wins Michigan. If Trump wins Michigan, it’s gonna be a rough night for Joe Biden in November when it comes to this upcoming election. I mean, he could lose the election based on that, and if you go back and look, and I’ve covered a number of presidential elections, you go all the way back. Gosh, 2008, it was the financial crisis. 2012, it was Superstorm Sandy. I mean, there are a lot of elections where these kinds of very surprising intervening events take place and they can really move the numbers the last second and fundamentally change the direction of the race.

He’s facing tough polling numbers. There’s the threat of Arab Americans and younger Americans abandoning him over his support for Israel. And then there’s also some troubling trends in certain demographics that voted for him big in 2020. Do you think that his reelection prospects are in big trouble right now?

I don’t think so. There’s sort of a conventional wisdom. You talk to people around Washington, “Well you getting ready for the next Trump administration?” like wait a minute, we’ve got to have the election! We haven’t had the election yet. I will say you don’t underestimate how much people dislike Donald Trump. His negatives are extremely high. There are just some people who are never going to get over January 6. There are many Republicans, and if you look at the Nikki Haley Republicans and the percentage, people talk about all these states where Joe Biden is losing a certain percentage of votes, but if you look at it, that phenomenons also happening with Trump, and to some degree it’s worse in how it’s happening in some of these states. So I do think Trump has his work cut out for him, and just the way he’s conducting himself out on the campaign trail, praising January 6 rioters as hostages, talking about poisoning the blood of our country, how does that at all help him with suburban female voters outside of Philadelphia, Atlanta, Detroit, and so on? I just don’t see it, and he’s not going to change course. I’ve covered him for too long. He is not. You could get a vice presidential candidate that can soften him around the edges and so on, I just don’t see any of that occurring. The one thing that could hand the election to Donald Trump is the RFK Jr., you mentioned him earlier, candidacy. Cornel West, Jill Stein, you add up those votes in a place like Wisconsin, it could be enough. 6,500 votes, something like that, boom, Donald Trump wins the state of Wisconsin and it becomes a really dark night for Joe Biden and the Democrats. That’s not beyond the realm of possibility. It’s not far fetched at all.

There’s been a lot of reporting previewing the threat that a second Trump term would pose to the United States. Jonathan Swan and Maggie Haberman have been all over this. Politico had a big piece on it. The Atlantic had a whole issue about what a second Trump term would look like. As as a journalist, from your perspective, what worries you the most about a second Trump term? Is that something that you’ve thought about as a possibility and as a concern?

I’ve thought about it. Toward the end of the 2020 race, I mean, I was wondering, do I need to move my kids out of the country, and I’m being serious about that. That was something that I was worried about, and people might say, “Oh, that’s a joke,” but I was concerned about it at the time because there was just so many threats coming in as I was covering the Trump presidency.

Well you had a lot of personal death threats, right? It got quite intense from what I can recall?

It got extremely intense. There’s still some of that that happens, but not to the degree that it was during his administration, and I thought, I don’t know if that’s something I should subject my family to for another four years, and so it was a thought that went through my mind. And I suppose if he somehow does get back in, if there’s some fluke and he does get back in, I guess I’d have to reexamine that.

Where would you consider going?

I haven’t thought that far. I mean, I did think about it, I’m being really honest with you, and I do worry about what would happen to the press in another Trump administration. I don’t think that is Chicken Little, the sky is falling. I think that that is a very real concern that news organizations should have, and they probably should be preparing for that, and I’m just an anchor guy, I don’t run a news organization, and I wouldn’t pretend to know how to do that, but I think that that’s something that should be prepared for. I think that there are probably going to be threats against the press, they’re going to be the same threats that we saw taking place during the first administration, and I think what you’re seeing in the news now is the folks that are going to be coming in are the true believers. You’re not going to have the General Milleys, you’re not going to have the John Kellys, you’re not going to have the folks who are going to put their foot on the brakes and say, “No, no, no, we’re not going to do this, Mr. President. We’re not going to do that.” They’re going to be a little more wily the next time around, and I’ve heard that from talking to people that talk to him from time to time, that they’ve already started to game this stuff out. They kind of know where they want to put people and it’s not something we’d have to use our imagination a whole lot to figure it out who would go where and so on.

There’s two things I think that people forget a little bit from Trump’s time in the White House, and the first one is Cesar Sayoc, a huge Trump supporter, sent pipe bombs to CNN. It was because Trump relentlessly attacked CNN in very personal ways, and it led to pipe bombs being sent. And the second thing that I think people forget is that so many administration officials that served in Trump’s administration are now warning very loudly that it was very bad and that they had to stop it from being a lot worse.

You mentioned Cesar Sayoc. I will remind folks because people might be hearing this and they might say, “Oh gosh, listen to Jim. Wow, he’s really hyperventilating there. My goodness, what’s wrong with him?” Cesar Sayoc, I will point out, and I wrote about this in my book, was putting on Twitter not only death threats aimed at a variety of people. He had posted death threats aimed at me saying, “Acosta, you’re the enemy of the nation. You’re the enemy of America. You’re next,” and there was one of his tweets, there was one of his posts that had a photo of a decapitated goat’s head, and that was the one that really concerned me, concerned people at CNN, and I only tell people that because it’s not something that people are imagining and, “Oh, gosh, they’re taking out of context,” or some of his supporters just get carried away, and when he’s pushing people’s buttons the way that he does out on the campaign trail with poisoning the blood and hostages and so on, I mean you just have to know that there are going to be some people who are receiving that information, absorbing that information, who may not be as well as you and I and may act accordingly, and that is the world that we would all be transported back to. To some extent we’re transported back to it now because we’re going to have this campaign, but if he gets back into the White House, constitutionally he has for years. There are some people in the Trump orbit who have talked about, “Well, can we amend the Constitution so he could run again in 2028?” I mean, that is that has been talked about, and so who knows when that environment is going to leave the scene, and we may be stuck with it.

Case in point is January 6.

And you don’t have to imagine it. You don’t have to say, “Oh, if I were in that situation.” I mean, there are defendants in these January 6 cases who have said on the record in federal court before a judge, “I did this because Trump told me to,” and so that again, getting back to what I was saying earlier, facts matter. The truth matters. You just talk about this in a factual basis. You just lay out the facts, lay them out, and this is what occurred, this is what is occurring now, and this is what may happen based on what’s occurred in the past.

Let’s say you did continue on and wanted to cover the Trump second term, would you consider going back into the briefing room?

No, no, no. I mean, I did about seven and a half years at the White House for CNN. I did the second Obama term, which nobody remembers.

Josh Earnest behind the podium.

Josh Earnest, Jay Carney, and they would get aggravated with me sometimes. For the record, you go back, if anybody wants to give that a Google, you can, but the team that we have over there is fantastic. We would have another crop, potentially, of young correspondents who would be able to go in there and do a terrific job. And the last thing, I’m not one of those anchor types who is like trying to bigfoot the correspondent in the briefing room. I don’t want to do that. You know what I mean? Like, let the next wave come through and show us what they got.

Another cable news network was in the headlines for all the wrong reasons last week. MSNBC, the Ronna McDaniel fiasco. What did you make of that drama?

Oh, gosh. I was surprised that they hired her. But I’m of the mindset I don’t love like the, “Hey, let’s let’s go after these people in the press, let’s go after those people in the press.” Maybe I’m too nice of a guy, I don’t know, but I just don’t like to throw stones in glass broadcast houses. But I was surprised that they made that hire. It looked like a lot of their viewers were surprised by all of that and I think they realized that they made a mistake and they responded accordingly. Aidan, none of us are going to get this right 100% of the time. We work in a business as journalists. One of the things that I like to say about our business is there’s a lot of different ways to do what we do and a lot of different ways to write a story, a lot of different ways to produce a newscast, a lot of different ways to anchor newscast, and to to some extent, it is a little bit of trial and error, and we haven’t always made the best hiring decisions. NBC hasn’t always made the best hiring decisions. Fox obviously hasn’t always made the best hiring decisions. And same with the other ABC, CBS, and so on. The newspapers. They have their share of things that happen as well. I just think it’s a learning process and I think that’s what they’re going through over there right now at NBC. I have a lot of friends over there, I like a lot of them over there, and I feel badly that it occurred, but I just don’t know if it’s something that we should just go after them with a hammer on, honestly. I think that they wanted to bring in somebody who would bring in a Republican point of view and I think what they did was probably underestimate just how upset people are out there, and they’re still upset about what took place on January 6, how there really hasn’t been a whole lot of accountability in its aftermath beyond just the folks who attacked the Capitol, and to see somebody who is intimately involved in that process of trying to overturn the election being hired by one of the main brand name news organizations in the country, I don’t think that’s a surprise that that would be frustrating.

CNN employs a number of ex-Trump officials. I’m sure there are people out there that feel that no one who worked in that administration should be given a perch at a media outlet. What do you think about that? Do you think there’s a difference between someone like Ronna McDaniel and other Trump officials that have a place on CNN?

Yeah. That’s getting to the whole discussion of platforming people and who do we platform, and I don’t think we should — and this is me speaking personally. I don’t speak on behalf of anybody except myself — I do think you have to be very careful about platforming, hiring folks who were involved in an effort to overturn an American election when you have, people like Chris Krebs who worked in the administration saying it was the most secure election in American history, and to this day we haven’t seen any evidence of widespread voter fraud. We just haven’t seen it. And you have a cast of characters who are involved in that process of trying to overturn that election. That is a very serious thing, and it led to an attack on the Capitol that disrupted the peaceful transfer of power for the first time in this country’s history. That just no small thing and so I do think it’s a little bit of a situation where news organizations have to be careful about that. Should we interview people who were involved with that? Sure. Should we put them live on the air? I don’t know if we should do that, but can you sit down with them, across from them with a camera and ask them very tough questions and corner them and don’t let them off the hook? Absolutely. But hiring, platforming, that’s a different discussion. I think that’s where you get into an area where you have to be a little careful.

Now just speaking about the cable news industry more broadly, obviously a major anxiety inside the industry right now is how it can thrive, not survive. It’s obviously going to survive in some form or another, but how it can thrive as ratings go down, cord cutting goes up. How do you feel about the state of the industry right now?

There’s there’s certainly a lot of anxiety, but there always has been in this business. I think there’s a lot of hand-wringing. The thing that I worry about the most, and it’s not really like, “Oh, the cable networks. Oh, the TV networks,” I mean, yeah, there’s something to be said for that, and I’m not disputing that, and we could get into a discussion about it and streaming and versus cutting the cord and all that, I will tell you the thing that I’m most concerned about, and I’ve talked about this, is the way the newspaper industry in this country is completely falling apart. If you go to medium market and small market towns all over this country, newspapers are just being decimated, and what is filling that space? Crappy talk radio, garbage online, people going into their information silos, people going on social media. Things like Twitter now being — now X of course — just becoming a cesspool. It’s just awful. Like our social media companies are just letting us down. And those are the things that really worry me because you have a whole segment of American society that greatly needs information and they’re just not getting it in some parts of this country. I’ve been to all 50 states, and I’ve been doing this job for the last 30 years, and I’ve watched just going into these towns, covering elections and so on, the newspapers and various markets just getting thinner and worse, and the coverage is just not where it used to be, and you’ve got talk radio filled with just all kinds of craziness. I mean, whatever happened to the FCC and the fairness stuff? You can say anything on talk radio now, and by and large it’s dominated by ultra-conservative, extremist voices who are not telling people the truth about what’s going on in this country. That worries me a whole hell of a lot more than what the number is in the demo at this cable company versus these people who are moving over to streaming and so on. I do think that if streaming is done in a really interesting and thoughtful way, I think it could be a hell of an asset if the brand name news media companies could turn it into a weapon for democracy, for information, and maybe weapon is not the right word for it, but almost like a public service, almost like the old utilities like we used to have in this country, Ma Bell and so on. I’m going to sound like a little old in the tooth here, but imagine if our brand name media companies could come out with streaming services that just really gave people great information, and I’m going to probably get myself in trouble for saying that, but we’re trying to do that here at CNN and other places are trying to do it, too. But there’s just a real deficit of good quality information and a lot of parts of the country that a lot of us in the press don’t think enough about.

Are you confident in Mark Thompson, your new overlord?

I’m highly confident. I’m highly confident. Is he back there? [Laughs]. No, I’m highly confident.

He’s got experience in this stuff.

He’s got a wealth of experience and knowledge, and look, we’ve got a very successful website. We’ve got a very successful app. We have a very successful brand name. People watch us all over the world. When I was traveling, covering the president, I could go to any foreign capital and people, the taxi driver would be like, “I know you!” because the numbers may say a certain thing in the Nielsen ratings, but that doesn’t count. You go to anywhere, Delhi, Tokyo, Riyadh, Latin America, I mean, just about anywhere you could put on CNN international in your hotel room, and so it’s a strong company, and I think it’s just going to keep getting stronger. I have a lot of affection for it and I got an appreciation for it when I had the experience that I went through during the Trump years, and I’m one of those types, internally, that feels a little bit like I’m like the big brother trying to stand up for my little brother and make sure that nobody messes with him. You know what I mean? So I think we’re going to be fine and I think that’s going to show itself, reveal itself over the course of this campaign and what comes after.

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