“People who stick their head above the crowd get hit by rotten fruit,” Donaldson said, quoting an old adage. “Jim sticks his head above the crowd. But if you look at what he’s doing, the questions he’s asking, the questions he’s pushing back on, his refusal to accept a bunch of hooey, yes, in a way that is grandstanding. But thank goodness he’s doing it.”

If Acosta enjoys the skirmishing, his work life can still be unnerving from time to time when angry amateurs leap into the fray.

“I receive more threats than I could count; it’s almost every week,” said Acosta, a soon-to-be-divorced father of two—mentioning one social media denizen who reacted to a recent Instagram photo of the CNN correspondent on a ski vacation by wishing that he’d race into a tree and kill himself; and a second troll who hoped he’d get cancer.

“I don’t think we should go too deeply into it,” Acosta added. “The company is aware, and they’ve urged me to take precautions.”