Is Elon Musk Incapable of Understanding This Simple 2018 Viral News Story?

He's misrepresented this story on several occasions. Ignorance or malice?

Hey everyone. Parker here. I hope you all had a good weekend.

Back in 2018, Timothy Burke at Deadspin published a story about conservative media company Sinclair Broadcast Group, headlined, “How America’s Largest Local TV Owner Turned News Anchors Into Soldiers In Trump’s War On The Media.” In it is evidence that Sinclair required its stations to air a bizarre public service announcement warning viewers to be on the lookout for “biased and false news,” “fake stories,” and for “members of the media” who “use their platforms to push their own personal bias and agenda to control ‘exactly what people think’” because “this is extremely dangerous to a democracy.”

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It was absolutely wild. Go click over to read it. It’s bonkers. This was around the time when there was a lot of Russia-related news that made Trump look bad. He was running around calling everything “fake news,” and his buddies at Sinclair decided to put their thumbs directly on the scale and essentially tell their viewers, “Yeah, other news outlets are straight-up lying to you,” without any evidence. They weren’t talking about Macedonian troll farms. They were telling their viewers that other media outlets, the ABC affiliate next door, was peddling “fake news.” That’s a completely bonkers thing to do, but Sinclair did. Not just in one city, but all across the country. Watch:

This was a story about a conservative media group using the ABC/NBC/CBS/FOX/etc. affiliates it owns to spread pro-Trump anti-media “fake news” propaganda to try to discredit real, factual stories that have not been corrected or retracted in the years since.

What has been almost as wild has been how backward people get it. One person, specifically.