The MRC Flips Over Elon Musk, Part 28: Finally, Enough
After years of gushing over everything Elon Musk did, his feud with President Trump appears to be the one thing that has stopped the Media Research Center from obsessively covering him.
(The Series: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9, Part 10, Part 11, Part 12, Part 13, Part 14, Part 15, Part 16, Part 17, Part 18, Part 19, Part 20, Part 21, Part 22, Part 23, Part 24, Part 25, Part 26, Part 27)
The Media Research Center absolutely loved Elon Musk’s hack-and-slash work with the so-called Department of Government Efficiency — until he pointed out that President Trump’s massive budget bill would add trillions to the deficit. Alex Christy spent a May 28 post being annoyed that this was noticed:
According to a NewsBusters study, ABC, CBS, and NBC’s coverage of Elon Musk’s budget-cutting efforts at DOGE was 97 percent negative, but on Wednesday, their respective morning shows of Good Morning America, CBS Mornings, and Today found a strange new respect for Musk’s concerns about the deficit as they used him to undermine the Big Beautiful Bill recently passed by the House.
ABC’s Jay O’Brien began his report by declaring, “President Trump has been adamant he wants Republicans united behind his mega bill full of a laundry list of campaign promises. But one top ally is still not on board this morning, Elon Musk.”
The origin of all three reports was Musk sitting down with CBS Sunday Morning for an interview that will air on June 1. In a clip of that interview, Musk was shown declaring, “I was, like, disappointed to see the massive spending bill, frankly. Which increases the budget deficit, not decreases it, and undermines the work that the DOGE team is doing.”
Christy then departed from his employer’s Heathering narrative of bashing any conservative who strays even slightly from right-wing orthodoxy to give Musk a pass:
Yes, it is his opinion. Conservatives are allowed to disagree with each other whether deficit reduction or investments in border security and defense should be the priority. What is not okay is for ABC reporters to simply repeat context-free Democratic talking points, which is what O’Brien proceeded to do:
[…]
When Musk was running DOGE on a more full time basis, the media did everything they could to portray him as some sort of heartless monster, but now that he is spending more time away from government, his concerns about the Big Beautiful Bill are treated as a perfectly natural response to high deficits because it would undermine Trump’s second-term legacy.
Christy didn’t explain why high deficits are suddenly no longer a right-wing concern.
Still, the MRC tried to defend Musk’s DOGE work. Intern Lucas Escala declared in a May 30 post:
MSNBC’s host of All In, Chris Hayes, got the facts wrong on Thursday as he criticized Elon Musk, who was preparing to make his way out of office. As a special government employee, Musk was granted only 130 days to lead DOGE in rooting out waste and corruption within the government. In that time, Musk has cut an estimated $175 billion in unnecessary spending across the board. However, Hayes asserted that Musk’s step down had nothing to do with the expiration of his work period, but rather being a result of the fact that “No one likes the guy.”
[…]
Believe it or not, disagreements are not what defines politics; it is the ability to compromise, the ability to put aside differences with those you disagree with for the greater good, that makes a good politician. As Musk prepared to leave office, President Trump hosted an event and press conference honoring him on Friday, making it apparent that being “wholesale rejected,” as Hayes put it, was far from the main takeaway of Elon Musk’s time with DOGE.
Escala offered no evidence all that cut spending was “unnecessary.” Christy offered a similar take in a May 31 post:
New York Times columnist David Brooks did the not-so-clever trick of insisting he wasn’t saying what he was indeed saying on Friday’s edition of PBS News Hour as he reflected back on Elon Musk’s time at DOGE by comparing him to Pol Pot, Mao Zedong, and Joseph Stalin.
Host Amna Nawaz wondered, “David, how do you look at it? What’s his legacy, if we know that yet?”
Brooks declared that, “As a budget matter, you would not say he had a big effect, but he did manage to destroy NIH and USAID. And the USAID one is the one I haven’t gotten over. And so there’s folks at Boston University who count, how many people have died because of what DOGE did at USAID? And USAID was a very ill-managed organization. That’s true.”
He then claimed, “according to the Boston University folks, so far, 55,000 adults have died of AIDS in the four months since Trump was elected, 6,000 children are dead because of what DOGE did. That’s just PEPFAR, the HIV. You add them all up, that’s 300,000 dead, and we’re four months in.”
At this point, it should be noted that President Trump’s proposed 2026 budget keeps PEPFAR funding steady.
In fact, Trump has gutted PEPFAR, reportedly causing the deaths of 70,000 people.
Escala returned for another complaint in a June 2 post:
Somehow, CBS had come to the conclusion that they deserved credit for the end of Elon Musk’s time with DOGE. On CBS News Sunday Morning, the complete interview between David Pogue and Elon Musk was finally aired; having generated much media attention from a clip CBS circulated days prior, in which Musk expressed his criticism of President Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill, and supposedly led to his ouster.
[…]
As much as CBS might like to say their interview forced Musk out of office, even they couldn’t deny the reason he gave: his time as a special government employee had naturally come to an end. Having been given only 130 days to lead DOGE in clearing waste and inefficiency within the government, Musk’s leave was an inevitability.
Despite disagreeing on the Big Beautiful Bill, President Trump and Musk’s relationship did not take the drastic turn that CBS may have hoped it would. At the event Trump hosted Friday in Musk’s honor on his last day in the White House, the President confirmed that this would not be the end of Musk’s time with the administration, saying, “Elon is really not leaving. He’s going to be back and forth, I think.”
Elon confirmed the sentiment, telling reporters that he would “continue to be visiting here and be a friend and adviser to the President.”
Those don’t really sound like the words of somebody forced out of his position by a president upset with his comment in an interview.
Nicholas Fondacaro devoted his June 4 hate-watch of “The View” to defending Musk:
You would think that an ABC News program like The View would have some sort of journalistic standard they needed to meet, but that clearly wasn’t the case during Wednesday’s episode. In their opening segment flinging crud at Elon Musk, co-host Sunny Hostin claimed he had killed nearly 300,000 children and co-hosts Whoopi Goldberg and Joy Behar hinted that he knew how President Trump stole the 2024 presidential election.
Before claiming Musk had the blood of nearly 300,000 children on his hands, Hostin mocked Musk for not cutting as much government spending as he wanted. “[H]e promised to slash $2 trillion from our $7 trillion budget. Then he moved it down to 1 trillion then it turns out he cut about 160 billion, which is about 2.3 percent,” she chided. “So really, he saved our country less than one percent, nothing!”
Without evidence or a citation of a source, Hostin proclaimed that Musk was personally responsible for killing all those kids:
If Fondacaro had watched David Brooks a few days earlier, he would know that the death number came from Boston University. It’s also worth noting that the MRC still believes the 2020 election was stolen from Trump because, supposedly, not enough people knew about Hunter Biden’s laptop. Fondacaro has never repudiated that conspiracy theory.
Trump-Musk feud
As rifts developed between Trump and Musk, the MRC got mad that the truth was being reported about it. Intern Ashley Taylor found a Republican congressman to try and tamp things down in a June 6 post:
On Thursday night’s broadcast of The Source with Kaitlan Collins, Tennessee Republican Congressman Tim Burchett turned the tables on CNN and accused the network of overhyping the escalating feud between Elon Musk and President Trump while ignoring the very economic anxieties of working Americans.
The moment came during a panel, alongside Texas Democrat Vicente Gonzalez, where Collins pressed Burchett to weigh in on Musk’s recent explosive social media tirade against the President. In a series of posts, the Tesla and SpaceX CEO had called for Trump’s impeachment and endorsed JD Vance as his replacement, as well as baselessly accused Trump of being listed in the Epstein files, a move that stunned political observers and dominated headlines.
Burchett made his stance clear: “I’m on President Trump’s side. He’s our Commander-in-Chief. Elon Musk is a private citizen, he’s allowed to speak his mind, but he doesn’t have a vote in this.”
The Congressman was quick to downplay the drama, calling Musk’s remarks “bogus” and “personal,” especially referencing allegations Musk made about Trump’s ties to Jeffrey Epstein. “You don’t lie about someone like that, especially something so serious,” Burchett said.
But his main criticism wasn’t directed at the recent social media buzz, it was aimed squarely at the media. He then directed the conversation at Collins, and the media at large, “You, as a legitimate member of the media, should shake your head at that whole thing.”
“In two weeks, nobody will be talking about this,” Burchett said. “Y’all will be finding something else to run the country down about. It’s a shame the media seized on this, because America is more worried about paying more taxes right now.”
Another intern, Escala, groused about the coverage of a legitimate news story in a post the same day:
Regardless of where you stood on President Trump and Elon Musk’s heated social media battle, anyone could take a moment to appreciate the people who were most definitely getting it wrong. Many in the media were quick to blow the debate out of proportion Friday morning, and CNN This Morning was no exception.
During their roundtable discussion of the posts, two guests, New York Times journalist Lulu Garcia-Navarro and CNN senior reporter Edward-Isaac Dovere, passed on reporting facts to share their views on the matter.
As host Audie Cornish reveled in the reaction of “Democrats just with popcorn,” Garcia-Navarro explained her view on where Trump would take matters:
[…]
Where was she even getting this from? Since when had the government had the power to kill a man who disagreed with the president over social media? Even with Trump’s threats of canceling contracts with Musk, nothing here was an overreach of presidential power, and she even acknowledged that herself.
Of course, that’s not what’s important to fear-mongering liberals. What counts is hammering home in every situation that Trump is an abusive authoritarian, even when it is irrelevant to the conversation.
Tim Graham served up his own grousing in his June 6 podcast:
Elon Musk and Donald Trump are now dramatically at odds, and no one is happier than the left-wing press. Time magazine’s giddy headline was “The Musk-Trump Implosion Can Be Seen From Space.” ABC “comedian” Jimmy Kimmel compared his thrill to being a kid at Christmas.
The New York Times today said Trump and Musk “retook the White House, slashed the federal government, and reshaped U.S. alliances…Yesterday, that relationship imploded in public. Perhaps, for two mercurial billionaires with large personalities and little tolerance for dissent, it was inevitable.”
On CNN, New York Times podcaster Lulu Garcia-Navarro claimed “if you look at the history around the world of authoritarians breaking up with their oligarch buddies, those oligarch buddies don’t end up in a good place. They either end up impoverished, imprisoned, or dead.”
Jeffrey Lord served up a similar whine in his June 7 column:
They love it.
You can almost smell the popping popcorn in the various offices of the nation’s liberal media as they zero in on whatever is the latest in the President Trump versus Elon Musk circus.
And make no mistake. For the liberal media the dust-up between the two men is manna from headline heaven.
[…]
The real question here is: why?
Past Presidents have parted ways with senior advisers, whether in the Cabinet or senior staff. As a Reagan White House alum, I well and vividly recall the abrupt resignation of then-White House Chief of Staff Donald T. Regan as a result of the “Iran-Contra” scandal affair and, no small thing, his disfavor with First Lady Nancy Reagan.
But it didn’t take long for Regan to vanish from the headlines, a similar fate for other high-ranking presidential appointees in other administrations.
[…]
The real question here?
What serious effect will all of this media circus have both on the two major players, not to mention on the considerably serious issues at play?
At this point it is too soon to tell. But that there will eventually be some lasting impact on not just the men involved but on the serious fiscal and budgetary governmental policy that is at the center of all the to-do over the “Big Beautiful Bill” there can be little doubt.
And without doubt, the liberal media, making this into a media circus, is loving every minute of it. For them, this hoo-ha can’t go on long enough.
You mean like how the MRC tried to make a right-wing media circus out of every controversy involving a Democratic president?
Backing away
Sseemingly in the wake of his break with President Trump — which it groused was even considered news given his high-profile job in Trump’s administration — the MRC hasn’t done much coverage or defense of Elon Musk. Fondacaro groused in his July 7 hate-watch of “The View”:
Following their vacation for the week of America’s birthday, ABC’s The View was coming in hot on Monday during their “Hot Topics” segment; ABC News co-host Ana Navarro suggested that Elon Musk stole the 2024 presidential election for President Trump. She received no push back from anyone for the accusation, instead, she received support from co-host Sunny Hostin. She even tried to ghoulishly politicize the tragic floods in Texas over the weekend.
[…]
Without evidence of what she was eluding to, Navarro demanded that Musk “look at what he did in this past election” with “his 300-plus-million dollars” spent. Again, without evidence, she suggested that he did more than just spend money, all while getting vocal support from Hostin:
Fondacaro dismissed all this as “ugly election denialism” — but didn’t mention the ugly election denialism his employer engaged in after the 2020 election, when it hyped the conspiracy theorythat the non-right-wing media stole the presidential election from Trump by not being as obsessed with Hunter Biden as its fellow right-wingers were.
An Aug. 11 post by Tom Olohan demanded that Musk censor a prime source from X’s “community notes”:
In response to a recent post from a well-known Wikipedia bias critic, X owner Elon Musk hinted at forbidding the use of the online encyclopedia as a go-to source for censoring users’ posts on X.
Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger requested that Musk consider banning citations of Wikipedia from Community Notes, Aug. 7, calling the influence it has over the Community Notes on X “disturbing.” Musk criticized the woke online encyclopedia for its bias in response the following day: “I agree that Wikipedia cannot be used as a definitive source for Community Notes, as the editorial control there is extremely left-biased (and nihilistic imo). Actual source material, not derivative, matters much more.”
Sanger has harshly criticized Wikipedia for its leftist bias before. He has even called the online encyclopedia “one of the most effective organs of Establishment propaganda in history.”
Olohan did not criticize Musk for the decline in Community Notes being permitted on X, nor did he cite an example of Wikipedia-sourced claim in a Community Note being incorrect.
It took Dan Schneider, Michael Morris and Jonah Messinger to crank out an Aug. 21 “study” whining that X isn’t biased against Democrats:
X owner Elon Musk can no longer hide behind predecessor Jack Dorsey and the radical programmers who have remained with the company since its change of ownership. Nearly three years after Musk bought Twitter (now X), the platform still favors liberals over conservatives, boosting voices on the left at the expense of account holders on the right. And this includes the accounts of members of Congress.
Democrats are the clear winners in the X sweepstakes, especially the most extreme members of Congress, like Senators Mazie Hirono (D-HI), Adam Schiff (D-CA), Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and Raphael Warnock (D-GA); and Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), Rashida Tlaib (D-MI), and Maxine Waters (D-CA).
X assigns “visibility scores” to each of its account holders. These scores determine the degree to which posts are either amplified or suppressed. In the U.S. House, the highest visibility scores heavily favor Democrats, with 20 of 25 of the best scores belonging to the most radical members of Congress. Conversely, 20 of 25 of the lowest scores are assigned to Republicans, effectively resulting in the deboosting of their posts.
Similarly biased results (though slightly less drastic) played out in the Senate. X assigned 16 of 25 of the highest visibility scores to Democrats and 18 of 25 of the lowest visibility scores to Republicans.
The trio are effectively demanding that Democrats be censored on X or otherwise be punished for being better on the platform than Republicans are, though they won’t come righto ut and say it:
As the current study demonstrates, the X algorithm still needs a lot of work. Much like the observed differences in account visibility, X also attempted to carry on a Jack Dorsey censorship creation, BirdWatch. Attempting what Musk claimed was a more democratic form of fact-checking, he rebranded BirdWatch as “Community Notes” and proceeded to utilize the mechanism in place of heavier-handed approaches on other platforms. Despite his best efforts, the mechanism has proven to be “censorship by a different name.” And while Musk claimed a “freedom of speech, but not freedom of reach” policy on X would only affect individual posts and not accounts generally, the MRC has explained why the continuation of yet another Dorsey approach to censorship is a danger to free societies.
Analysis has shown that free speech can continue to improve on X, possibly becoming the “global town square” Musk envisioned. Musk has even posted to X about his desire to remove the “tweepcred” score, highlighting a hope for positive change.
Yes, they really think that opinions that aren’t right-wing are “a danger to free societies.”
But the MRC is never going to be too hard on Musk, though. It has refused to criticize how his Grok AI engine on X spewed pro-Hitler rants, or mention that Grok itself has bashed Musk for meddling with its programming.