Pardon me for not joining the journalistic pack and defending the divine right of reporters to act as buffoonishly as possible without suffering consequences. I know that is the response de rigueur for editors when someone like Acosta goes out of bounds, but I bring nearly four decades of experience in community journalism to the table, and to me Acosta is just one more self-important reporter who gives a bad name to the hard-working journalists who take their job more seriously than their haircut.

Truth be told, I have hired a couple of reporters and photographers over the years who thought they could be rude to the subjects they were covering. But unlike CNN I didn’t sue the sources who objected to the bad behavior of my employees; instead I sat down the culprits and told them that a repeat performance would not be tolerated. That, in a nutshell, seems to be the difference between community journalism and celebrity journalism. No one wants to sit Jim Acosta down and tell him the truth. He is a pretentious boor who needs to settle down and do his job — respectfully!

This entitlement mentality of his (and others in the TV pack) seems to be a manifestation of the mistaken belief that journalists have been granted some kind of hereditary nobility endowed to them by Woodward and Bernstein of Watergate fame.