CNN chief White House correspondent Jim Acosta told his colleague, CNN Reliable Sources host Brian Stelter yesterday that he said “thanks, but no thanks” to a request to appear on former White House press secretary Sean Spicer‘s upcoming talk show.
“We politely turned that down,” Acosta said when asked if he’d appear on a show Spicer is developing. “My sense of it is that Sean has crossed the line from being somebody who was a former press secretary to somebody who wants to resurrect his career and go on Fox News and bash CNN. And if he’s going to do that, I don’t think we should give him time to do that,” Acosta said.
Acosta’s comments come days after The New York Times reported Spicer’s plan to host a talk show. No network has picked up the project, called Sean Spicer’s Common Ground. The first episode is supposed to be filmed later this month.
“In this current environment, I think it’s important to have a platform where we can have civil, respectful, and informative discussions on the issues of the day,” Spicer told the Times last week.
Spicer and Acosta didn’t have the greatest of relationships when Spicer was Trump’s press secretary, to put it mildly.
Acosta once called Spicer “kind of useless” as a spokesperson, referred to certain briefings held by Spicer as “basically pointless.” During a June 2017 appearance on CNN, Acosta told Brooke Baldwin that covering the White House is “like we’re covering bad reality TV.”
In July 2017, Spicer told a reporter: “If Jim Acosta reported on Jim Acosta the way he reports on us, he’d say he hasn’t been very honest,” Spicer said. “I think he’s gone well beyond the role of reporter and steered into the role of advocate. He’s the prime example of a [reporter in a] competitive, YouTube, click-driven industry,” Spicer added. “He’s recognized that if you make a spectacle on the air then you’ll get more airtime and more clicks. . . . If I were a mainstream, veteran reporter, I’d be advocating for him to knock it off. It’s hurting the profession.”
Here’s Acosta’s appearance on Reliable Sources, which also includes discussion about his experience at a recent South Carolina rally, and why he feels its necessary to shout questions at the President Trump: