CNN White House correspondent Jim Acosta took a shot at Fox News on Sunday during a conversation about how Trump supporters attack the press.
"People are going to yell at us," Acosta told CNN's Brian Stelter. "They're going to tell us to go home. We're not going to go home. We're going to do our jobs."
Acosta pointed out that most Trump supporters are reasonable people when they have one-on-one conversations.
"Sometimes it's getting one-on-one with these folks, American to American," he explained. "When you have that one-on-one interaction, people tend to let some of those biases, some of those prejudices they've developed from watching Fox News and so on to break away and you can have a real conversation."
Stelter wondered why Acosta received "so much criticism" from Fox News.
"Well, to some extent, you know, the president and Fox News, they don't have Barack Obama around anymore," Acosta noted. "They don't have Hillary Clinton. Although they go after her a lot. They replaced Obama and Hillary. They need somebody to attack. I think that we've sort of filled that role."
"There are folks on the conservative side, I refer to them as the 'MAGA phone,'" he continued. "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 said that many of the Trump supporters who attack him at campaign rallies "are developing their impressions of us by watching [Fox News host Sean Hannity] and so on. Watch us and make up your own mind."
"Listen, if they want to send me to hell, I'll still be shouting at the devil," the CNN reporter continued. "We have a job to do. I've said this times before and I'll say it again. They can kick us out of the briefing room, out of the White House. We're still going to do our jobs. And my attitude is that we fill a necessary role in our democracy. The rest of the world is watching us. They don't understand how they can call us fake news and my response to all that is my goodness. Are we supposed to sit back and do nothing? My sense of it is that you have to push back."
Acosta warned that America's tradition of a free press is in danger because of the relationship between Fox News and the White House, which reportedly is in talks to hire disgraced former Fox News executive Bill Shine for the job of communications director.
"We have so many people from Fox News who work at the White House or have worked at the White House that this is just a further, I guess, meshing of these two entities," Acosta said. "And, you know, what we have in this country right now and people need to be aware of it is we don't have what we have traditionally seen as the media's role in this country as having essentially a free press."
"We have what I consider to be a system of state supported media," he pointed out. "You have a White House, a president that lends so much support to one individual news network which gives them beneficial coverage that it has changed the nature of what we view as being our system of delivering the news in this country."
"They won't talk to us individually, they'll go on Fox News because they know they're going to get a friendly platform."
