Via the Free Beacon, should we cut him some slack here and chalk it up to an innocent misstatement in the moment? The reason I ask is because, as you’ll see in the second clip below, he went on to interview an Angel Mom on air after Trump’s press conference and was cordial to her, allowing her to name her son and specify that he was killed by an illegal. “In terms of all of us here at CNN, our hearts go out to them,” he stressed.

Although … perhaps there’s more to that cordiality than might at first appear:

After that somewhat heated exchange, Angel Moms are discussing immigration with @Acosta. One mom who lost her daughter tells him “there is a huge problem..there are mothers going through this everyday.”

Acosta tells them he didn’t mean to offend, says “my heart goes out to you” pic.twitter.com/owkb9pUGUi — Christal Hayes (@Journo_Christal) February 15, 2019

Jim Acosta convinced by Angel Moms to do a live shot with with them behind him. They’re telling their story on @CNN now. Finally the network airs #realnews pic.twitter.com/W3pwV3cSWl — Jon Miller (@MillerStream) February 15, 2019

Did he have any choice but to interview them after Trump made a point of referencing them in his reply to Acosta at today’s presser?

“Allegedly” is an interesting mistake too given that Jim Sciutto made the same “mistake” today, reportedly referring to the moms at one point as “mothers who lost children, or alleged to have lost children to undocumented immigrants in this country.”

Maybe this is standard journalistic practice for CNN. When you haven’t verified a fact personally, you emphasize that it’s “alleged” no matter what it applies to. That’s fine if so, but that rule would be so difficult to follow uniformly in practice that it’s bound to be violated in hundreds of innocent, and maybe less innocent, ways each day. Is it fair for CNN to refer to Howard Schultz as a billionaire if no one at the network has inspected his financials firsthand? And yet they do so routinely, I’m sure.

This is likely more a function of the network’s bottomless skepticism towards Trump than towards Angel Moms specifically. They’ve probably concluded at this point that literally nothing he says or does should be taken at face value, including his invited guests at a presidential announcement. So they dropped an “allegedly” on Angel Moms even though there’s no question, of course, that American citizens have lost loved ones to murders or accidents caused by illegal immigrants.



