News Organizations Are Tiptoeing Around What We All Saw

How fear of litigation shapes coverage of influential figures

This week, we watched as the world's richest man appeared to give a Nazi salute at Trump's post-inauguration rally. Twice. Then we watched as mainstream media outlets bent over backwards to avoid saying what we all saw.

Here’s the clip:

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The New York Times went with "Elon Musk Ignites Online Speculation Over the Meaning of a Hand Gesture." The Washington Post opted for "Elon Musk gives exuberant speech at inauguration." Some local TV stations, as Marisa Kabas noted at The Handbasket, even cut their footage right before the first and most obvious salute.

Meanwhile, as Tim Dickinson reported at Rolling Stone, neo-Nazis and white nationalists weren't shy about what they saw. Blood Tribe leader Christopher Pohlhaus shared the clip with SS lightning bolts, writing "I don't care if this was a mistake. I'm going to enjoy the tears over it." The Proud Boys Ohio chapter posted it with "Hail Trump!" White Lives Matter celebrated with references to "The White Flame."

So why are mainstream outlets so reluctant to state the obvious? The answer lies in our broken defamation laws and the way wealthy individuals can weaponize them against critics. This is a legitimate free speech crisis.

NBC News reporter Kat Tenbarge explained on Bluesky: "It's difficult to overstate just how much professional journalists have been trained to fear defamation lawsuits and how much it has impacted the ability to tell the truth." She's right. And there's recent precedent for this fear when it comes to Musk specifically.

Photo by ANGELA WEISS/AFP via Getty Images

Remember what happened to Media Matters? As Andy Craig points out, they "simply shared screenshots of major corporate ads running next to literally Hitler stuff and he sued them into mass layoffs and got two states to open criminal investigations of them." The chilling effect was immediate. Craig notes that coverage of similar issues "kind of petered out" afterward—"not because it got any harder to find examples to report."

This is what journalist Mike Masnick calls a SLAPP (Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation) lawsuit. These suits aren't necessarily meant to win in court; they're meant to silence critics through the sheer cost and hassle of defending against them. That's why Masnick and others have been "calling for anti-SLAPP laws (both federal and state) for years and years."

We're living in a media environment where the truth has become nearly impossible to state directly. A billionaire can make a gesture that neo-Nazis celebrate as explicitly supporting their cause, and major news organizations feel compelled to describe it as "exuberant" rather than risk saying what it actually appeared to be.

Context matters here. This isn't just some random rich guy making an awkward wave. This is someone who has tweeted agreement with an antisemitic conspiracy theories and recently allied himself with the far-right AfD party in Germany.

When neo-Nazis and white nationalists are celebrating your gesture while mainstream media outlets are afraid to even describe it accurately, something has gone terribly wrong with our ability to tell the truth about power.

The irony is that by trying to avoid defamation suits, news organizations end up participating in a kind of mass gaslighting. We all saw what we saw. The neo-Nazis celebrating it saw what they saw. But major media outlets are forced to pretend otherwise, eroding trust in journalism and making it harder for the public to understand what's actually happening.

Democracy dies in the shadow of lawsuits that prevent us from turning on the lights.

A GIF of Musk’s “gesture”