The radical cost-cutting and firings at CNN that left anchor Jim Acosta without a show and headed for the exits on Tuesday are the latest examples of how President Donald Trump and his long-running campaign against “fake news” have finally hit paydirt.
In his new book, Shameless Liars: How Trump Defeated the Legacy Media and Made Them Irrelevant, WMAL radio morning host Larry O’Connor credited Trump with proving to America that corporate media can’t be trusted and should be boycotted.
“Indeed, one of the most significant victories he enjoyed over his enemies in the legacy media was a self-inflicted forfeiture the media willingly and stupidly engaged in. You could say the media defeated themselves on this one. They forfeited their last gasp of credibility by consistently overreaching in their vitriolic attacks on Donald J. Trump,” he wrote in the book out on Tuesday.
???? BREAKING: CNN's Jim Acosta rage quits live on air.
— Media Research Center (@theMRC) January 28, 2025
Another win for President Donald Trump! pic.twitter.com/rcPe6kbyaq
While Trump fought with the media in his first election in 2016, it wasn’t until the COVID-19 crisis and the most recent race that the public realized his attacks on the media were true, O’Connor said.
The one-sided reporting on Trump since the COVID-19 crisis prompted news consumers to research the president’s charges of bias, and for many, they proved true.
“Viewers, readers, and listeners were able to sift through the accusations, see the reality, and reach their conclusions. This scenario then led them to ask themselves a very reasonable question: If this network or cable station or newspaper is lying to me about this, what else are they lying about? Why should I trust anything they say?” O’Connor wrote.
By the time the 2024 election started, O’Connor said consumers were on the lookout for bias and that they got an earful on everything from Trump being “Hitler-like” to then-President Joe Biden being on top of his game to Vice President Kamala Harris being the best-ever presidential candidate.
“Not only had these outlets delivered propaganda about Trump and Vance that turned out to be ineffective or even outright deceptive, but they also were exposed for propping up Kamala Harris (and Joe Biden before her) as some kind of second coming. CNN and MSNBC viewers were fed a regular diet of ‘Harris and Walz are the greatest politicians of our era, and they’ve run a perfect campaign!’” O’Connor said.
Not only were many in the media shown to be liars, O’Connor wrote, but for the first time, the public got it.
“These are the benefits of Trump’s victories over the media. In fact, Trump’s victories in November of 2024 were victories over the old, broken way the legacy media did their dirty business in the first place, and it signaled the opportunity for new rules to be employed going forward,” he said.
Those new rules include legitimizing blogs and podcasts of those not in the media but who are citizen journalists. And it put a stamp of approval for Republicans to ignore big media.
“We all owe him a huge debt of gratitude — if we’re all wise enough to take advantage of these spoils. We should all be wise enough to follow through and officially, once and for all, ignore the dominance that mainstream outlets have given themselves, without any actual merit. The reality is that the legacy media emperor has no clothes,” wrote O’Connor, who dedicated his book to his late mentor and alternative media creator Andrew Breitbart.
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In his book, he also lists those he feels acted as pro-Democrat con artists in the 2024 election: George Stephanopoulos, Joe Scarborough, David Muir, Lester Holt, Norah O’Donnell, Kristen Welker, and Margaret Brennan.
“We should call them what they are: propaganda. Propaganda on behalf of their corporate ownership (Disney, Comcast, Viacom, etc.) and propaganda on behalf of their party, the Democrats. They are nothing more than that. Trump’s overwhelming victory against them and their constant, relentless propaganda efforts against him has finally exposed their true nature for all to see,” O’Connor wrote.