Former CNN drama queen Jim Acosta sat down in front of Senator Adam Schiff last week to warn America that “partisan hacks” are taking over the news business. Jim Acosta said that. Out loud. Into a microphone. At a hearing hosted by the guy who spent four years lying about Russian collusion on every cable news channel that would have him.
You cannot make this stuff up, folks.
Acosta — who quit CNN in January 2025 after the network tried to stuff him into the midnight time slot like a pair of old sneakers in the back of the closet — showed up at Burbank City Hall to testify at Schiff’s “Lights, Camera, Competition” hearing. The stated purpose was to discuss Hollywood job losses and the Paramount-Warner Bros. Discovery merger. The actual purpose was to let a bunch of disgruntled liberals cry about the fact that not every television network on planet Earth is a propaganda arm of the Democrat Party anymore.
“The news is broken,” Acosta declared, without a shred of irony. “We may not be able to put the pieces back together.”
He’s right about one thing. The news IS broken. He just can’t figure out that he’s one of the guys who broke it.
Acosta’s big concern is that the Paramount Skydance merger — a $110 billion deal that would give David Ellison’s company control of both CBS News and CNN — will result in (gasp!) conservatives having a say in what gets reported. He called the Ellison family a “MAGA-friendly oligarchic family” and whined that “you basically have partisan hacks running CBS News.” He’s talking about Bari Weiss, the new editor-in-chief who committed the unforgivable sin of hiring a couple of center-right commentators.
So let’s get this straight. Jim Acosta — the man who spent Trump’s entire first term screaming at press briefings, grandstanding on live television, and getting into physical altercations with White House interns over microphones — is worried about partisan hacks. The guy who turned CNN’s White House coverage into a one-man audition tape for MSNBC thinks OTHER people are the problem.
And he delivered this warning to Adam Schiff. ADAM SCHIFF. The same Adam Schiff who went on every talk show in America for three years claiming he had seen “direct evidence” of Trump-Russia collusion. The same Adam Schiff the House of Representatives formally censured for “purposely deceiving his Committee, Congress, and the American people.” That guy is now a United States Senator from California, which tells you everything you need to know about California.
(Two of the most dishonest people in American media, sitting across from each other in Burbank, complaining about dishonesty. It’s like watching two arsonists host a fire safety seminar.)
Here’s the part that makes this whole circus even more pathetic. CNN’s primetime audience has collapsed to 573,000 viewers. Let that number sink in. There are high school football stadiums in Texas that hold more people than CNN’s entire nightly audience. The network has lost 45% of its primetime viewers since 2017. In July 2025, CNN hit its lowest primetime ratings in the history of the network — 497,000 total viewers. Fox News, meanwhile, now commands 63% of the entire cable news audience.
But sure, Jim. The problem is that conservatives might get to run ONE network.
Acosta doesn’t seem to realize that he’s the walking, talking answer to his own question. He wants to know why the news is broken? Go look in a mirror, pal. Viewers didn’t leave CNN because David Ellison bought Paramount. They left because CNN spent a decade treating half the country like domestic terrorists and the other half like idiots.
Now here’s what nobody at that Burbank hearing wants to talk about. Acosta isn’t really testifying because he cares about journalism. He’s testifying because he’s a guy with a Substack newsletter begging the federal government to protect the industry that just fired him. Think about that for a second. The man who couldn’t draw enough viewers to keep a daytime cable slot is now asking Congress to make sure nobody changes the channel.
This is the pattern every dying industry follows. Newspapers blamed Craigslist instead of building better websites. Taxi companies sued Uber instead of cleaning their cabs. And now legacy media journalists are running to Washington to get the government to stop the Ellisons from touching their precious newsrooms. They’d rather have Adam Schiff regulate their competition out of existence than make a product people actually want to watch.
The math tells the whole story. CNN cut 200 jobs in early 2025 — 6% of its workforce. MSNBC lost 65% of its primetime demo audience after the election. NBC News axed 150 staffers. And what are all these unemployed “journalists” doing? Flooding Substack and starting podcasts. Substack says 50 people on its platform make over $1 million a year. That sounds impressive until you realize there are tens of thousands of former reporters on there fighting over the same shrinking pool of liberal readers who already agree with everything they write. Jim Acosta is competing with 10,000 other Jim Acostas now, and most of them are funnier than he is.
The Paramount-WBD merger is going to close later this year. David Ellison is going to own CNN. And the people currently working at CNN are reportedly “shaken” and “depressed” about it. You know who isn’t shaken? The 45% of CNN’s former audience that already left. They moved on years ago. They don’t care who owns CNN because they stopped watching CNN.
Mark my words — when the merger closes and Ellison starts making changes at CNN, the same people who just spent a decade telling us that private companies can do whatever they want (remember when they said that about Twitter banning conservatives?) will suddenly discover a deep and passionate love for government regulation of media companies. The hypocrisy will be breathtaking, and they won’t even notice it.
Acosta wrapped up his testimony by insisting that America is headed toward “state-run media like Russia or China.” This from the man whose former network took editorial direction from the Biden administration, ran with the “51 intelligence officials” lie about Hunter’s laptop, and suppressed every story that might have hurt Democrat election chances for the better part of a decade.
Jim, buddy — we already had state-run media. You were the anchor.