As a journalist, Jim Acosta wants you to know that he never wanted to make himself the story. In fact, it is the first sentence on the jacket of his newly published book.

However, throughout his four years covering the Trump administration, from the campaign trail to the White House, Mr. Acosta found himself propelled into the limelight of the surreal political landscape of Trump’s America.

During this time, Mr. Acosta was elevated from the status of a traditional CNN news anchor to, as many define him, a symbol of the resistance against Trump’s attack on “fake news.”

Mr. Acosta details the story of his experience covering the Trump administration in his book, The Enemy of the People: A Dangerous Time to Tell the Truth in America. There are quiet moments with members of Trump’s inner circle, including Sean Spicer, Jared Kushner, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Reince Priebus, Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller. And there is the larger plot of the major news events documented on cable news networks such as CNN.

A veteran journalist who worked his way up the ladder, from local radio to national television, Mr. Acosta eventually became chief White House correspondent for CNN. After covering the much more traditional Mitt Romney campaign in 2012, and the Obama White House, he said he was immediately intrigued by the energy, anger and potential consequences of Trump’s rhetoric in the 2015 campaign.

“At the time I was looking at a pretty unprecedented kind of campaign . . . . As the year went on he was saying more and more outrageous things,” he said in a phone interview. “Then, in December, he announced his proposal of the Muslim ban, and all along he was staying on top of the polls . . . I remember thinking, this is potentially one of the biggest political stories of my career . . . Members of the press covering him, including myself, couldn’t believe our own eyes.”

He remained at the front lines of the major news cycle as Trump quickly found his place in the oval office, at each turn pushing the President and his administration to remain loyal to the facts. However, Mr. Acosta and much of the press soon became targets of Trump.

“I think we have to have a common sense of the truth and common sense of reality if we are going to be able to make decisions about the future of our country,” he said. “And I think that the record is clear when the Washington Post fact checker comes to the conclusion that POTUS has uttered 10,000 wrong or misleading facts in office. It stands to reason that what he says on a daily basis, and what he says on Twitter, needs to be held to scrutiny.”

The emotional and political climax of the book comes in two waves. First, with a tweet sent out by President Trump declaring the press to be “the enemy of the American People!” And second, with Trump pulling Mr. Acosta’s press pass to the White House. Mr. Acosta believes the latter moment, and his victory in the ensuing legal battle to regain the pass, to be a watershed moment for the power of our democratic system and the freedom of the press in America.

“Do we really want to hand off to the next generation a political climate where it’s acceptable for the President of the United States to refer to the press, the referees of the truth, as the enemy of the people . . . Is this the road we go down?,” he said. “That is the question that is at the heart of my book, and I think the vast majority of Americans know the answer to that question . . . This is about putting our country first, above political party.”

Mr. Acosta concluded the interview with a call to action.

“I do think that journalists have to work harder than ever to be accurate and to make sure we stay in our lane . . . It has made our job tougher than ever, but it has also made our job more valuable than ever.”

On Saturday, August 3 at 9 a.m., Jim Acosta will take part in a panel called The Role of the Press: the Presidency and Society. On Sunday, August 4 at 8:30 a.m., he will participate in a discussion with Rita Braver.