Acosta Mocks Gutfeld After Fox Host Mocks His New Substack Show

LONDON, ENGLAND

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Former CNN anchor Jim Acosta laughed off a segment from Fox News‘ Gutfeld! devoted to mocking his new Substack show in a tweet directed at the host Greg Gutfeld. Acosta left his long-time perch at CNN last month in the wake of reports that CNN Worldwide Chairman and CEO Mark Thompson had attempted to exile him to a midnight to 2 am ET show. The proposed schedule swap from Acosta’s weekday 10 am time slot was widely seen as an ill-advised attempt to curry favor with President Donald Trump — especially since Acosta had a long history of ratings successes in that weekday morning hour and his previous weekend gig for the cable network.

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Since then, Acosta has launched a media operation, including The Jim Acosta Show, a Substack Live program broadcast from his Washington, D.C. residence. Guests so far have included actor and comedian John Leguizamo, Rep. Chrissy Houlahan (D-TX), attorney and legal commentator David Weiss, and political commentator Grant Stinchfield. It’s a lineup that’s not radically different from his CNN show, where he chatted with a rotating cast of elected officials, political commentators, and Luke Skywalker himself, Mark Hamill. . Acosta’s show with Eisen, who is also a CNN legal analyst, was the target of ridicule for Gutfeld and his panel Wednesday evening. “Things are looking grim for our old pal Jim,” said Gutfeld to kick off the segment, deriding the Substack platform as “Substack, a stack but not as good?”

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The longtime Fox News host bashed Acosta for naming his show The Jim Acosta Show as a bright yellow all-caps “GUTFELD!” logo was displayed right behind him. (Gutfeld later praised the online shows of two of his former Fox News colleagues, Tucker Carlson and Megyn Kelly—which are called The Tucker Carlson Show and The Megyn Kelly Show, respectively.) The segment continued along those lines, with Gutfeld and his panelists spending nearly eight minutes criticizing Acosta’s houseplants, a camera glitch Eisen had, and Acosta’s commentary about speaking truth to power. In response to a clip of Acosta mentioning his viewers, Gutfeld joked that there were only “three people” including members of Acosta’s family, and complained that the “only people watching” were “people like me” who “need content to make fun of you, and even this is a stretch because” it was “not even good bad, it is boring bad.”

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Acosta shrugged off the mockery in a tweet Thursday morning. “Hey thanks for the plug @Gutfeldfox on your program,” Acosta wrote. “You’re as bad as Hannity. Don’t you guys have anything else to cover? That’s right. You can’t say anything critical of Trump or Musk! Sad! Hear my response later today on the show.”

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Contrary to Gutfeld’s quip about Acosta having only “three viewers,” his Substack racked up more than 35,000 subscribers the day it debuted shortly after Acosta’s last CNN broadcast. Two days later, that number was more than 116,000 and is now over 190,000 a little over a week after launch, with over 100,000 viewers per episode of the show.

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Mediaite reached out to Acosta for comment and he said that his tweet “speaks for itself…don’t these guys have anything better to cover?” and called it “sad” how Gutfeld and his colleagues “were sorta entertaining,” but “now they’re just lapdogs for Trump.” Acosta noted the challenge of keeping a show interesting when its coverage is overly friendly towards its subject matter and pondered, “What are all these guys gonna do for four years?” He added that he’ll be expanding his show to YouTube very soon and would offer a more expansive response to Gutfeld on his show later in the day. Mediaite reached out to Fox News for comment but did not receive a reply. Watch the clip above via .