AN EXPOSÉ ON BRAVE FIRE FIGHTERS RUSHING INTO BURNING BUILDINGS: With “Inside the Intense, Combative World of Covering the Trump White House,” Variety, which used to reserve its attention strictly for the deliberately fictitious aspects of the entertainment industry, turns its sights on a different group of television “entertainers.” Note this passage, from the bravest firefighter of them all. (Just ask him):

“There is that natural tension that exists between the press and the people we were covering, but it was never like this,” Acosta says. “We were never called ‘fake news.’ We were never called ‘the enemy of the people,’ and that just created a totally different climate and environment that we are all trying to make sense of and trying to figure out: How do we cover the news in that kind of toxic environment?”

Does Jim Acosta actually not know that he works for CNN, whose former chief executive Eason Jordan penned an essay in 2003 for the New York Times titled “The News We Kept To Ourselves,” where he admitted that his network created fake news out of Iraq simply to have the “Live From Baghdad” imprimatur on the Chyron? And that Jordan resigned two years later from the network after it was discovered that he claimed at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland that the US military was deliberately targeting journalists for assassination in Iraq?

More recently, as far as being called “the enemy of the people,” does Acosta not know or care that employees in multiple divisions of Time-Warner-CNN-HBO have a yen for doxxing anonymous Americans?

Also in that same column, as T. Becket Adams of the Washington Examiner tweets, the Washington Post’s Ashley Parker, “The woman who screamed ‘DO YOU FEEL THAT YOUR GAFFES HAVE OVERSHADOWED YOUR FOREIGN TRIP???’ at Romney during his visit to a Polish war memorial says she now has to — get this — QUADRUPLE check her work because of the ‘fake news environment.’ These are dark times indeed.”

Heh.™ Choose the form of your destructor, to coin an Insta-phrase.

(Classical allusion in headline.)