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.
Elon Musk has now, on five separate occasions, either posted or responded to someone else posting that video as though it is evidence of a leftist/liberal anti-Trump, anti-conservative media cabal of some sort. Sometimes, he acts as though the very act of them reading from teleprompters is the scandal (no, that’s not it, dude), but he never quite gets that the reason the video was made was because it was proof that conservatives like him are detached from reality.
This has happened on at least four separate occasions.
January 12, 2024; May 27, 2023; April 13, 2023; March 20, 2023
Like most claims that the media has a “liberal” bias, the opposite is true. Gigantic corporations are run by billionaires like Musk and do their bidding. They’re not “liberal.” They’re not “on the left.” Musk pushing this lie with the Sinclair video yet again (it’s dishonest to not point out that this is from right-wing media and simply be like, “Look, they just read anything on the teleprompter, just like in Anchorman!” to get his weird fanbase riled up against mainstream media) is shameful. It’s just another good excuse for me to bring up the original story, which should have been a bigger deal in the first place.
That’s it for me today. Thanks, as always, for reading.
I’ll be back again tomorrow with another edition of The Present Age.
Parker
Oh yes, I remember this story. Trust Elon to get it absolutely backwards.
May I suggest that this is done intentionally? Elon knows what the story actually was, but the facts don't suit his purpose. As you know, it's a dominant discourse on the right that "the mainstream media" are all liberal (or LIB-rull, as Rush Limbaugh used to say), and thus, they cannot be trusted. Only the Dear Leader can be trusted-- in this case Elon, but also provocateurs like Tucker Carlson or Donald Trump. So, given the tendency of Elon's supporters towards confirmation bias, he likes to repurpose any content he finds online, as long as it reinforces the dominant discourse that facts are not facts, and you really can't believe what you see with your own eyes. And every time he says something that is utterly false, he is fairly sure that his "true believers" won't fact-check what he just told them; they'll just believe it, no matter how untethered from reality it might be. We've all seen the commentators on Fox News, as well as Trump himself, using this same tactic many times as well, ripping something from its context, and then generating outrage about it. As I said, this is an intentional strategy; the goal is to reinforce what his supporters already believe, while keeping them loyal-- because they know only HE tells them the truth, and the "liberal media" are filled with lies. (This story makes me sad, because it's yet another volley in the battle against critical thinking. It promotes "belief" over analysis. It's also a reminder that few folks can turn on the outrage machine more effectively than guys like Elon or Tucker or The Former Guy.)