The Trumpification of Elon Musk

I told my colleagues in the newsroom at the time that we shouldn't cover everything he said or wrote. In the past, a president's every word was assumed to be a signal of future policy, and was reported as such. Many things were said to get a rise out of people. Reporting on them just fed the fire. An editor tried to push back. He said that the man was the president. He says what he says is true.

Many news outlets went back to doing their real job, which was to report on what Trump's administration was actually doing, much of which he himself might have been, at best. News habits from the early Trump years have reappeared around Musk.

Here, we saw a lot of rapid-response news stories about Musk's December 11 statement that "My pronouns are Prosecute/Fauci", a dig at the government's former chief infectious disease expert, and at gender diversity. There is a picture of his bedside table with two replica guns on it, as well as some more information about him.

The news coverage of Musk is a betrayal of the Trump years. There is a large category of stories that report with a kind of morbid delight on moves that will surely sink the platform in short order. Right-wing outlets ignore Musk's worst behaviors to argue that his slash-and-burn tactics are the only way to get rid of excess bureaucracy and make it profitable.

The way coverage of Trump was done was exactly like this. The right-wing media treated his egomania, corruption, and lack of interest in grasping basic policy as evidence that he was not fit to be president, while the liberal media focused on his ability to bring himself down in flames. There was a lot of good reporting going on at the same time, but the accounts that were controversial dominated the discussion. The public was made to understand what was happening across the country through incompatible narratives about the behavior of a man in the White House.

This is what is going on with Musk. The relationship between the new owner and the journalists who cover him is described in the Atlantic as adysfunctional.

Friedersdorf argues that Musk's journalistic critics should give him more benefit of the doubt, since he did ban West, refused to reinstate Jones, and helped suppress the story about Biden's computer. I think that strays from both-sides-ism.