Is Jim Acosta Losing His Show at CNN?

AP Photo/Evan Vucci, File

CNN has been struggling with low ratings and in response is now planning a shakeup of the network's schedule. There are a bunch of moving parts here and nothing has been announced yet but one possibility is that Jim Acosta will be losing his show.

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The 76-year-old Blitzer, one of the network’s longest-tenured anchors and current host of “The Situation Room” at 6 p.m., will be teamed with Pamela Brown on a new morning show, sources told Status newsletter on Thursday.

The shakeup could also include frequent Donald Trump antagonist Jim Acosta being bounced as anchor of “CNN Newsroom” at 10 a.m., the sources said.

I'm reminded of when CNN moved Don Lemon to a morning show. As we all know, that didn't work out too well. Lemon was fired after a series of embarrassing on-air moments.

One of CNN’s most recognizable stars, Mr. Lemon had a reputation as a fiery political commentator during his eight years as a prime-time anchor. But inside the network, he began to lose support after he made remarks in February about women and aging that were widely perceived to be sexist. The incident generated a national uproar and a rare public rebuke from Mr. Licht.

Mr. Lemon had asserted on the air that Nikki Haley, the 51-year-old Republican presidential candidate, “isn’t in her prime, sorry,” adding, “A woman is considered to be in her prime in her 20s and 30s and maybe 40s.” He dismissed the objections of his female co-hosts by responding, “I’m just saying what the facts are — Google it.” He later apologized to the CNN newsroom and agreed to a corporate training program to address his on-air behavior.

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Lemon then went on to blow up his agreement with Elon Musk for a show on X and currently makes news mostly for shouting at Democrats who are civil to Republicans. Will Acosta soon be following the same career path?

The current plan seems to be to move Kasie Hunt from early mornings into an afternoon timeslot. Jake Tapper's show would move to 5-7 PM and two other anchors would move to early mornings to take over the slot previously held by Kasie Hunt. But that still leaves the network needing to lose one hour of programming.

To accommodate Blitzer and Brown’s two-hour morning program, CNN needs to find an additional hour in its schedule.

One potential casualty is Acosta’s show...

It is unclear what role Acosta would have if the show were canceled.

One horrible possibility occurs to me. Acosta made himself a star by shouting at Trump from the press gallery. We all remember the real Jim Acosta show.

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If Acosta loses his timeslot, could that mean CNN will send him back to the White House for more exchanges like this with President Trump?  Maybe the network has decided to lean into the resistance. After all, it worked pretty well for them 8 years ago. If this recent clip of Acosta is anything to go by, he's clearly still game for making himself the defender of the media.

I guess we'll see what happens but it's hard to believe CNN is going to just let him go when they have a chance to use him to get under Trump's skin.

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