This rates a Nelson. Mr. Muntz has been getting a work-out on Ethics Alarms lately. The Nelson, as frequent readers here know, is used when condign justice arrives for some ethics miscreant of note, or when such an individual beclowns himself or herself. Nelson Muntz, for the culturally ignorant, has been a regular character on “The Simpsons” for more than two decades. His function is to issue a mocking laugh when he encounters the misfortunes or witnesses the embarrassments of other Springfield residents.

Jim Acosta is a long-time CNN reporter with delusions of grandeur. He is an “advocacy journalist” (which means, ironically, that he’s not a journalist at all) who fashioned himself as Dan Rather to Donald Trump’s Richard Nixon, or Sam Donaldson to Trump’s Ronald Reagan, the dogged liberal reporter knight pledged to slaying the conservative President dragon. Unfortunately for Jim and the rest of us, Acosta isn’t as smart as Rather or as careful as Sam, and is more unethical than either.

Though Acosta led the broadcast media siege of fake and spun news along with Big Lies and double standards to cripple Trump’s first occupation of the White House, CNN figured out that his act was not going to play this time around. Trump 2.0 took over after a decisive electoral win and a higher approval rating from the public than he had at any time in his first term. CNN, seeing its ratings sinking and trying to tack to the center after thoroughly discrediting itself in 2024 (along with the rest of the mainstream media that insisted Joe Biden was sharp as a tack, Kamala Harris ran a perfect campaign, Tim Walz wasn’t a boob and Donald Trump was an insurrectionist) decided that Acosta was a liability (“Welcome to the party, pal!“) so they moved his show to the midnight slot, which is the CNN equivalent of Hitler sending an officer to the Russian front.

So Acosta, laboring under the delusion that he deserves better, quit. Here was his astoundingly pompous farewell:

I just wanted to end today’s show by thanking all of the wonderful people who work behind the scenes at this network.

You may have seen some reports about me and the show, and after giving all of this some careful consideration and weighing in alternative timeslots CNN offered me, I’ve decided to move on. I am grateful to CNN for the nearly 18 years I’ve spent here doing the news.

People often ask me if the highlight of my career at CNN was at the White House covering Donald Trump.

Actually, no. That moment came here when I covered former President Barack Obama’s trip to Cuba in 2016 and had the chance to question the dictator there, Raul Castro, about the island’s political prisoners.

As the son of a Cuban refugee, I took home this lesson: It is never a good time to bow down to a tyrant.

I have always believed it’s the job of the press to hold power to account. I’ve always tried to do that here at CNN, and I plan on doing all of that in the future.

One final message. Don’t give in to the lies. Don’t give in to the fear. Hold on to the truth and to hope.

Even if you have to get out your phone, record that message. I will not give in to the lies. “I will not give in to the fear!”

Post it on your social media so people can hear from you, too.

I’ll have more to say about my plans in the coming days. But until then, I want to thank all of you for tuning in. It has been an honor to be welcomed into your home for all these years.

That’s the news. Reporting from Washington. I’m Jim Acosta.

Bye! Don’t let the door hit you on the way out, you self-righteous, arrogant hack.

I know that the Dunning-Kruger Syndrome describes people who are so stupid that they don’t know they are stupid, but what do you call the syndrome when you think you are brilliant at your job when you really stink at it? That’s Acosta. Reading his nauseating statement from last night, I took a tour of the Ethics Alarms dossier on Jim. It is necessarily much thinner than it could be: Acosta quickly identified himself as belonging in the same group with Joy Reid, Don Lemon, Charles M. Blow, Courtland Malloy, George Stephanopoulos, David Muir and others, openly biased pundits and broadcast journalists who viewed bringing down Donald Trump by any means necessary as their Holy Grail. I ignored his predictable dishonesty and lack of professionalism except when it was too egregious to let stand (or when I was short on topics).

Let’s see:

• In November of 2024, Acosta was one of the media liars who reported that Donald Trump wanted to have Liz Cheney executed by a firing squad.
• In July, Acosta sat and nodded as a Democratic Congressman said that it was racist for Republican to call DEI Vice-President Harris a DEI Vice-President, when the manner of her selection literally defines that unethical fad. That’s our Jim, courageously pointing out the truth.
• After the Supreme Court’s 9-0 decision in Trump v. Anderson telling the Colorado Supreme Court that it couldn’t remove former President Trump from the state’s primary ballot on the grounds that he participated in an “insurrection,” Acosta let Larry Sabato, the once reliable election analyst driven mad by the Trump Derangement virus, tell him, “You can’t save the people from themselves. If they’re determined to re-elect [Trump] after he organized that insurrection — arguably our first coup d’état — then there’s nothing to stop the people from doing that.” Again, Acosta had no problem with total partisan garbage, even when his guest had escalated the riot right past insurrection to a coup d’état: no giving into fear, right, Jim?
• Here was his deliberately deceptive question to Ana Navarro, before she outed herself as a hack by joining “The View.” Gov. DeSantis had told Disney that if they were going to interfere with Florida lawmaking and policy on matters having nothing to do with their business, then they were not entitled to the sweetheart deal that allowed the company to essentially govern its own territory unlike the other theme parks in the state. Acosta:

And Ana, I have to talk to you about what’s going on in your state of Florida. The governor there, Ron DeSantis, is punishing Disney for opposing this so-called Don’t Say Gay law. Aren’t Republicans supposed to be against cancel culture? What do—what do– you make of what’s been happening with this? We’re showing the video right now. He’s surrounded by all of these children. The other thing that stands out to me, as somebody who’s been to Disney World a lot with my family, I just can’t imagine a Florida politician going after Walt Disney World. What do you make of all this?

It was “so-called” the “Don’t Say Gay” law by those who wanted to mislead the pubic about what the law was about: nothing in the law mentioned not saying “gay.” Truth!

• In this post, I noted that reporter Debra Heine had compiled a useful list of the worst liars, hate-mongers, ethics corruptors,  and civic disrupters in the past three years who framed the President of the United States as a traitorous usurper who conspired with Russia to steal his high office. Guess who was on it?

 Acosta’s self-glorifying  exit from CNN would be sickening coming from a journalist who actually was what he pretends to be. (W.S. Gilbert wrote a non-Sullivan operetta called “The Mountebanks” about a magic lozenge that turned you into whatever you were pretending to be. That lozenge would have turned Jim Acosta into a trustworthy journalist.) Coming from a shameless propaganda agent like him, it’s truly disgusting.