Responding to criticism from Fox News over his reporting style which the network has characterized as inflammatory grandstanding, CNN’s Jim Acosta said he’s just become their punching bag.

“We’ve sort of replaced Obama and Hillary,” he told Brian Stelter on Reliable Sources today. “They need somebody to attack and I think that we’ve sort of filled that role. Part of the issue is that I think, you know, instead of wanting to focus on the president’s behavior, they’d rather focus on our reporting on the president’s behavior.”

Further straining the relationship between reporters from both outlets and the supporters of President Donald Trump, Stelter noted, is the burden on the press to fact check Trump on a laundry list of statements, and for some, those checks feel like critiques.

“There are folks on the conservative side, I refer to them affectionately as the MAGAphone,” Acosta replied. “They by and large just echo what the president wants to hear and what he wants to say. We see that a lot happening over on Fox News.”

Acosta also explained that reporters spend significant chunks of time “spinning our wheels” working as researchers to ensure the president’s remarks reflect the truth.

“That consumes a lot of the coverage and it presents, I think, to the American people the sense that all we’re doing all day long is bashing the president when in fact, we have to be fact checkers and so we have spend a lot of time fact checking the president,” Acosta said.

The president recently found himself the subject of scrutiny for his claims that Immigration and Customs Enforcement has liberated towns from MS-13, something which never occurred, and also for tweeting that he never urged Republicans to support an immigration bill, just days after tweeting the exact opposite.

Watch the clip above, via CNN.

[Image via screengrab]

Follow Amy Russo on Twitter: @amymrusso

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