The MRC Flips Over Elon Musk, Part 23: Sour About Lemon
The Media Research Center rushed to Elon Musk's defense after he abruptly canceled a Twitter/X show featuring former CNN anchor Don Lemon because he couldn't handle Lemon's questions.
Elon Musk and his Twitter/X had a very eventful spring:
A new book detailed Musk’s chaotic actions before and after he bought Twitter and his sense of entitled arrogance as an extremely wealthy man.
Matt Taibbi — whose “Twitter files” stenography on behalf of Musk the MRC absolutely loved — released unhinged messages from Musk from last year, when Twitter was shadowbanning links to Substack, Taibbi’s main meal ticket. The MRC has never told readers about Taibbi’s falling out with Musk.
Musk met with Donald Trump, whose presidential campaign is a little short of cash. Musk later insisted he would not donate to either Trump or President Biden, even though his actions in running Twitter/X pretty much look like an in-kind contribution to Trump.
Artificial intelligence firm OpenAI responded to Musk’s lawsuit against it over alleging that the company (which Musk co-founded) was abandoning its nonprofit mission by releasing emails showing that Musk acknowledged the company needed lots of money to power its AI ambitions.
The Musk fanboys at the MRC didn’t want to talk about any of this, of course, preferring to complain that Musk’s absurdly lucrative contract as a part-time CEO for Tesla was overruled in court and to fret that Musk allegedly isn’t making Twitter/X right-wing enough. And for a while, it also didn’t want to talk about the deal Musk and Twitter/X made with Don Lemon to host a news show there, whose firing last year from CNN the MRC heartily cheered. It was only after Musk killed the deal following a contentious interview with Lemon that the MRC had something to say — and, of course, blamed Lemon for the deal going south (and not Musk for, you know, being unable to handle criticism). Nicholas Fondacaro cheered the dumping in a March 14 post:
After almost a year of living in obscurity after being fired by CNN, disgraced primetime host Don Lemon was set to return as a political commentator with a show that would premier exclusively on X; with owner Elon Musk being his first guest. But the dream arraignment was over before it really started as Musk killed the deal after Lemon conducted a 90-minute interview that was apparently rather contentious. With their deal torn up, Lemon sprinted to his former employer to whine and claim Musk didn’t really value free speech.
Despite CNN being largely opposed to the idea of free speech (often only favoring the freedom if the press portion of the First Amendment), OutFront host Erin Burnett started off her show by trying to paint Musk as a hypocrite. “Now, this decision coming as Musk had, of course, publicly courted Lemon and has repeatedly made a commitment to free speech when he bought Twitter again and again and again,” she said, following up with a montage of instances of Musk talking about free speech.
In explaining “what happened,” Lemon admitted that there were “tense” moments during the interview and attacked Musk’s commitment to free speech. “Free speech is only important when someone you don’t like, or I would say someone who doesn’t have your same point of view are — someone is — if they’re allowed to speak freely and to say their point of view,” he bloviated. “Apparently, that doesn’t matter to Elon Musk. It’s just for maybe talking points for him or rhetoric...”
Lemon, a documented race baiter, might have also tried to make the flare-up about race because he suggested Musk didn’t like getting “questions about him from people like me.”
Fondacaro went on to whine about Lemon’s tough questions to Musk:
In the clips cherry-picked to be shown on CNN, Lemon accused Musk of being a racist, scrutinized the kind of medical prescriptions Musk received from his doctor, and suggested he might be funneling money to former President Donald Trump.
Lemon and Burnett made it clear the intent was to harm Musk and his businesses, particularly those that intersected with his government contract work. Despite eventually admitting Musk had passed every random drug test he’s ever been subjected to and they “don’t have any evidence,” they tried to portray the eccentric billionaire as a hardcore junkie akin to Hunter Biden[.]
Fondacaro made sure to let Musk have the last word: "In a comment posted on his platform hours before Burnett’s show aired but was never cited, Musk explained: ‘[Lemon’s] approach was basically just ‘CNN, but on social media’, which doesn’t work, as evidenced by the fact that CNN is dying.'” Fondacaro didn’t explain why all this did not make Musk a hypocrite.
Fondacaro hopped on the rumor mill for a March 18 post:
Disgraced media figure Don Lemon reportedly viewed billionaire Elon Musk, and his social media platform X, as a goose that would lay him a golden egg after CNN ousted him. According to reports, Lemon had made exorbitant and ridiculous demands in his negotiations to air his show on X. And when the deal fell apart after Musk pulled the plug, the billionaire compared Lemon to spoiled brat Veruca Salt from the movie Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.
According to reporting from Ariel Zilber of the New York Post, Lemon’s “astronomical wish list to Elon Musk” included “a free Tesla Cybertruck, a $5 million upfront payment on top of an $8 million salary, an equity stake in the multibillion-dollar company,” and the ridiculous demand to have “the right to approve any changes in X policy as it relates to news content.”
Those demands sounded like a far cry from Lemon’s claims to CNN last week that his agreement with X was just a “distribution” deal.
[...]
The vice chairman of the “talent” agency Lemon utilized, United Talent Agency, denied the allegations. “This is absolute, complete utter nonsense without an iota of truth to it,” Jay Sures told The Post.
It’s worth noting that The Post viewed documents that backed up their reporting.
In a post on X roughly an hour after the newspaper published their article about Lemon’s demands, Musk took a swipe at Lemon by comparing him to the spoiled girl from Willy Wonka who demanded a golden-egg-laying goose and an Oompa Loompa.
Fondacaro offered no reason why anyone should believe Musk or the New York Post at face value, given that both have agendas. And as Lemon later pointed out, “people negotiate all the time,” so even if it is true — actual proof of which has yet to surface — there’s no evidence any of this ever went past the discussion stage.
Tim Graham hurled a lot of wild overgeneralization and whataboutism — particularly aimed at MRC-hated CNN reporter Oliver Darcy for the offense of weighing in on the Lemon-Musk battle — in his March 20 column:
Everything CNN does now underlines how Chris Licht’s doomed attempts to calm it down are almost completely forgotten. On September 18, Oliver Darcy’s “Reliable Sources” newsletter was topped by the headline “Elon’s Reality Escape.” Because CNN defines what “reality” is, and “reality” has a virulent leftist bias. That bias makes you “Reliable.”
Darcy’s screed began: “Elon Musk is showing the world how radicalized he has become. The billionaire, one of the most consequential figures to walk the Earth, spent another weekend swimming in the right-wing fever swamps of X.”
The occasion was Don Lemon’s arrogant and ignorant interview of Musk, which caused Musk to pull his funding of Lemon’s program. Lemon made all kinds of strange demands of Musk, especially his demand to have some control of the platform’s “content moderation” policies.
“He’s not used to having to answer to anyone,” Lemon said in a Q&A with People magazine after his self-destructive debacle, “especially someone like me who doesn’t share his worldview, who doesn’t look like him.”
Darcy lamented: “Musk appears to be growing more intolerant of other viewpoints. While elevating right-wing extremists, he simultaneously seeks to destroy trust in credible news sources.” This is rich, since Darcy is intolerant of the “right-wing extremist” viewpoints and has openly advocated deplatforming Fox News and other conservative networks. CNN’s opinions aren’t opinions, they’re “facts.” Conservative opinions are “misinformation” and “hate speech.”
Graham offered no evidence whatsoever to back up his claim that the interview was “arrogant and ignorant” — indeed, neither he nor Fondacaro quoted anything that was actually said during the interview. Instead, he whined that Darcy criticized Musk’s increasing right-wing extremism:
In the midst of a cascade of purple prose, Darcy concluded: “At this juncture, calling Musk a right-wing s**tposter is no longer provocative. It’s simply accurate.”
Musk is simply too powerful to be a conservative malcontent: “In his ownership of X alone, Musk controls one of the world’s most important communications platforms, spitting corrosive venom into the public discourse at a faster speed than his SpaceX rockets hurtle into orbit.” Conservatism equals “corrosive venom.”
Darcy found only a sad decline into madness: “In effect, Musk has become self-radicalized on the very website that he was forced to purchase for $44 billion, sliding deeper into the darkest and most unsavory corners of the platform that has served to only reinforce his own worldview with an echo chamber of conspiracy theorists and ego-stoking sycophants that regularly fawn at his every move no matter how outrageous or preposterously false.”
For all that whining, Graham made no effort to disprove anything Darcy said. He concluded by pretending that Musk is a lucid media critic:
When his rant was ended, he turned to Kara Swisher for support on “Elon’s X-tremism.” She wrote: “My takeaway is that he has devolved into a very ill-informed thinker on a number of complex topics.”
When you think a conservative critique of liberal media is “ill-informed,” you’re suggesting that reliable “information” is liberal information and “misinformation” is conservatives trying to ruin routinely flawless liberal information. Who sounds “intolerant of other viewpoints”?
Again, Graham provided no reason for anyone to take Musk seriously as someone who offers “a conservative critique of liberal media” — he’s just happy that Musk is parroting the correct right-wing talking points. Then again, Graham probably thinks his own brand of evidence-free ranting is cogent “media criticism.”
Touting Musk and ‘free speech’
Given that it seems clear that Musk had fired Lemon for not sucking up to him enough during that interview, it was more than a little galling to see the MRC’s Tom Olohan gush over Musk’s purported love of free speech in a March 20 post:
Tech mogul Elon Musk unloaded about the importance of free speech and the challenges he has faced dealing with the prior regime at X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter.
During a live conversation with Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey on March 18, Musk stressed that Americans have an unparalleled right to freedom of speech that must be protected on social media. “No country has the protection of speech that the United States does, not even Canada,” he said on X Spaces (formerly Twitter Spaces). “So that’s something we should really take pride in and seek to preserve. I think that the bedrock of democracy is freedom of speech.”
Musk emphasized the importance of free speech by discussing what motivated the Founding Fathers to write the First Amendment. “[The First Amendment] exists because people came from countries where they could not speak freely, where if they did speak their mind they would be imprisoned or killed,” Musk explained. “That’s why they were so concerned about freedom of speech. It’s because they didn’t have it in the countries they came from. In many places of the world, maybe most places, you don’t have freedom of speech.”
Musk warned about political “constraints on speech” before calling out Twitter’s extreme bias under its former CEO Parag Agrawal. Musk said that there were roughly “ten voices on the right suppressed for every one on the left” on Twitter before he took over the company. Musk described the past regime as having a “very big thumb on the political scale.”
A few days later, Bailey sued Media Matters on Musk’s behalf over its research exposing that ads from major companies were appearing next to Nazi-promoting content — demonstrating that neither of them actually care about freedom of speech and care much more about intimidating critics into silence. The MRC has censored news about that lawsuit, just like it has censored all mention of Musk’s own lawsuit against Media Matters. Olohan was also completely silent about Musk’s firing of Lemon, which would seem to put the lie to Musk’s supposed dedication to “freedom of speech.”
Olohan did some more sucking up to Musk in an April 9 post, with the help of the MRC’s favorite misinformation-spreading (and kinda racist) podcast host:
Podcast host Joe Rogan spoke up about the impact of X owner Elon Musk breaking the leftist censorship monopoly on major social media platforms.
During the April 6 edition of The Joe Rogan Experience, fellow podcaster Andrew Schultz expressed his hope that Musk’s purchase of X and decision to “uphold this soapbox of free speech” would lead to “a civil society where ideas can permeate freely.” Rogan went a step further, telling his guest that “[Musk] may have very well saved humanity in some way” by buying Twitter and reversing much of the insane censorship practices of the Old Regime. Rogan, who survived a campaign to drive him from Spotify for his speech on vaccines, is not the only person that feels this way.
Olohan is being dishonest. Rogan wasn’t criticized over a “speech on vaccines” — he was criticized for spreading falsehoods and misinformation about COVID vaccines from Robert Malone, who has been repeatedly caught spreading misinformation. But the MRC puts narrative over facts, and Olohan continued to do what he gets paid to do by pushing that narrative — part of which involves the partisan claim that anyone who holds a right-winger accountable for his lies and misinformation is engaging in “censorship.”
More censored news, more Musk-fluffing
As springtime progressed, the MRC hid even more Elon Musk-related news from its readers?
A Musk tweet promoting the idea of massive election fraud in Arizona was brutally fact-checked as “extremely false” by an Arizona election official (who happens to be a Republican).
A far-right Twitter/X account Musk has previously championed viciously smeared the (black) mayor of Baltimore as a “DEI mayor” in the aftermath of the Francis Scott Key Bridge collapse, despite offering no evidence that the collapse had anything to do with the mayor or DEI. Many called out this racist attack.
Musk decided to give “premium” blue-check status and related privileges — normally $8 a month — for free to any Twitter/X who was deemed “influential members of the community,” a move that was widely viewed as a surrender from his attempt to turn the blue check into a moneymaker and a certain desperation on Musk’s part to keep users on the site.
Musk will make new Twitter/X users pay for each post they make, as much as $1, purportedly to stop the spread of bots on the platform.
And there are dozens of paid and verified Twitter/X accounts spreading neo-Nazi content.
Instead of reporting these news events to its readers, the MRC instead focused on happenings in Brazil, since doing so adheres to its Musk-fluffing agenda. Luis Cornelio was the designated fluffer in an April 8 post:
The battle between an infamous left-wing Brazilian judge and X owner Elon Musk has taken yet another dark twist that could put Brazil an inch closer to becoming a totalitarian regime, critics warn.
On Sunday, Brazilian Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes launched a criminal investigation into Musk after the tech mogul dared to defy a contentious court order demanding what has been described as the unwarranted censorship of some X users.
X’s Global Government Affairs announced that de Moraes ordered the social media platform to ban certain popular users over so-called disinformation. Tellingly, the judge ordered the platform to not disclose the order.
In response, Musk ordered the platform to unban these accounts, arguing that de Moraes has no legal basis for the requested censorship. Such a defiant act seemingly triggered de Moraes to launch a probe into Musk for potential obstruction of justice, criminal organization and incitement of crime, Forbes reported on Monday.
Journalist Michael Shellenberger, an individual who often breaks stories out of Brazil, tweeted on Monday that the criminal probe into Musk may lead to the closure of X’s operations in the Central American country.
Cornelio offered no facts to back up any of his assertions — that the investigation into Trump is politically motivated or that the disinformation being removed from Twitter in Brazil is “so-called” or “censorship” — he’s just repeating the narratives he’s being paid to repeat, which is more important to his employer than telling the full truth. And, of course, he’s hiding the full truth about what’s happening, as a more credible media outlet reported:
Neither Brazilian courts nor X have disclosed the list of accounts that have been ordered to stop publishing, but prominent supporters of former President Jair Bolsonaro and far-right activists no longer appear on the platform.
Some belong to a network known as “digital militias.” They were targeted by a five-year investigation overseen by de Moraes, initially for allegedly spreading defamatory fake news and threats against Supreme Court justices, and then after Bolsonaro’s 2022 loss for inciting demonstrations across the country that were pushing to overturn President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s election.
[...]
Whether investigating former President Jair Bolsonaro, banishing his far-right allies from social media, or ordering the arrest of supporters who stormed government buildings on Jan. 8, 2023, Moraes has aggressively pursued those he views as undermining Brazil’s young democracy.
Days after a mob stormed Brazil’s capital, de Moraes ordered Facebook, Twitter, Telegram, TikTok and Instagram to block the accounts of individuals accused of inciting or supporting attacks on Brazilian democratic order.
In other words, this is a case where Musk (along with Cornelio) is once again siding with right-wing interests who seek power and the undermining of democracy. Not a good look for either of them.
Cornelio added an update that perpetuated that Musk-fluffing framing:
On Monday, MRC Free Speech America reached out to the Brazilian Superior Electoral Court for comment on Elon Musk’s remarks against de Moraes, but a spokesperson did not respond. Instead, the spokesperson directed MRC to Moraes’s criminal referral to the attorney general, asking them to investigate Musk’s pro-free speech actions pertaining to the previous orders. You can find the referral (in Portuguese) here.
As we know from his lawsuits against those who tell the truth about him, Musk is anything but “pro-free speech” — not that Cornelio will ever admit that.
But when Musk ultimately decided to conform to the Brazilian court rulings, Cornelio effectively portrayed Musk as a traitor to the right-wing cause in an April 18 post:
Tech mogul Elon Musk has folded in his so-called defense of free speech in his recent battle with a Brazilian court.
On Monday, Musk’s attorneys informed Brazilian Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes that social media platform X (formerly known as Twitter) will comply with all of the censorship demands targeting accounts accused of spreading misinformation, according to Reuters.
“As already communicated to the federal police, X Brasil informs that all orders issued by this Supreme Court and the Superior Electoral Court will continue to be fully complied with by X Corp,” Musk’s legal counsel reportedly wrote in the letter addressed to Moraes.
Musk’s compliance marks a stark departure from his vehement threats to ignore the orders. “We are lifting all restrictions,” Musk declared on April 6, accusing the Moraes of threatening X with fines and imprisonment. “As a result, we will probably lose all revenue in Brazil and have to shut down our office there. But principles matter more than profit.”
The battle between X and de Moraes stems from an inquiry by Brazil’s Superior Electoral Court that centers on the spread of what the government deemed to be misinformation amid federal elections. In court rulings, Moraes accused X of allowing some popular Brazil-based users to spread so-called misinformation. In turn, he demanded Musk censor them.
In court decisions, Moraes accused X of being a major driver of alleged misinformation and demanded Musk censor these users. Amid Musk’s initial refusal to comply with such demands, Moraes threatened to impose daily fines of $20,000 for each account not banned.
Note that Cornelio again refused to acknowledge that the misinformation being targeted actually was misinformation, using qualifiers like “so-called misinformation” and “what the government deemed to be misinformation.” Again, Cornelio offered no evidence whatsoever that the things being targeted were not misinformation — another desperate attempt to cling to his predetermined narrative.
Meanwhile, P.J. Gladnick spent an April 21 post ranting that a Washington Post article defended the judge:
Brazilian Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes is enraged that X (which will forever still be known as Twitter) allows the free flow of information because he labels some of it “disinformation” which he cannot tolerate. Therefore de Moraes has demanded that Twitter remove a number of accounts.
In the old obedient days of Twitter when the management treated “disinformation” (which is mostly information contrary to liberal views) to be one of the great sins of our world, they would have immediately acceded to the request. However the new owner, Elon Musk, refused to take down the accounts which should make him a free speech hero. But in Friday’s paper, but to the Washington Post found the real hero in this matter is the authoritarian Brazilian Supreme Court Justice.
When a researcher with the Atlantic Council pointed out how Musk’s policies support far-right movements, Gladnick went for whataboutism by playing the George Soros card:
The Post failed to note that the leftwing Atlantic Council is a think tank funded by George Soros which hyped the idea for the Biden Department of Homeland Security’s Disinformation Governance Board. Ironic since by their rules, the failure to mention this could be considered… disinformation. See how that works?
Well, no, that’s not how that works at all. We recall that the MRC spent a lot of time trying to destroy the proposed Disinformation Governance Board with lies and smears — which it ultimately succeeded in doing — because it didn’t want right-wing disinformation to be called out (seemingly an admission that right-wing activists rely on misinformation to spread their narratives).
Like Cornelio, Gladnick refused to concede that any of the misinformation targeted by the judge really was misinformation, though he offered no evidence that it wasn’t.