What rates for Zucker also works just as well for Trump. Though Acosta’s explosive exchanges with Trump and former press secretary Sean Spicer make very good television, his face-offs against Sanders have given the White House plenty of ammo, too. Sanders, as Politico has observed, has a preternatural ability to “deaden a room” with her “trademark monotone.” Acosta’s strident passion, by contrast, can make him look like a grandstanding bully—at least as Sanders portrays him. “The media has attacked me personally on a number of occasions, including your own network,” she once told Acosta, during an infamous exchange where he pushed her to say the press was not the enemy of the people. “When I was hosted by the Correspondents’ Association, of which almost all of you are members of, you brought a comedian up to attack my appearance and called me a traitor to my own gender. . . . [And] as far as I know, I’m the first press secretary in the history of the United States that’s required Secret Service protection.” Her rare outburst was cheered on the right. “Sanders ought to be praised for refusing to parrot the words fed to her by a condescending male reporter,” wrote Bre Payton at the Federalist. “To insist that Sanders say exactly what Acosta wants her to say because he knows better is the definition of mansplaining.” The narrative, in classic Trumpian fashion, had been turned on its head.

It seems altogether fitting that Zucker, who gave Trump his first big television break by green-lighting The Apprentice, would be the one to have engineered this mutually beneficial publicity bump, with his 2015 decision to give the Trump campaign wall-to-wall coverage. (Media-tracking firm mediaQuant estimates that Trump ultimately earned some $5 billion in free advertising as a result—nearly $2 billion more than Clinton.) Not surprisingly, the actual journalistic relationship between most CNN reporters and the White House remains mostly cordial, as CNN Washington Bureau Chief Sam Feist recently told Pompeo. “I think they know that we have a very large and politically diverse audience,” he explained. “We reach people who vote, and people who are swing voters, and nobody in American politics would take those viewers for granted. That’s why any White House wants to make sure that CNN’s coverage reflects their perspective as much as possible.”

But Trump’s media bashing has had more sinister consequences, too. Acosta, a frequent presence at the president’s campaign rallies, has weathered some of the worst abuse from attendees who don’t share the Beltway’s cynical view of presidential demagoguery as some P.R. game. “I’m very worried that the hostility whipped up by Trump and some in conservative media will result in somebody getting hurt,” Acosta, reporting live from a rally floor in Tampa, tweeted in July. Last month, his fears were confirmed when a lunatic right-winger began mailing pipe bombs to more than a dozen high-profile Trump critics—including two bombs sent to CNN, forcing the network’s New York headquarters to evacuate. And yet, nothing has changed. Zucker accused the White House of “total and complete lack of understanding [about] the seriousness of their continued attacks on the media”; Trump retorted that the “lowly rated CNN” was only interested in assigning him responsibility for the bombs. But, as America’s warring clans drift further apart, everyone’s brands get burnished in the process: Acosta gets his Murrow moment, the White House gets to play the victim, and everyone gets to forget about, well, everything else.

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