The Trumpification of Elon Musk

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When Donald Trump was inaugurated in 2017, I told colleagues in the newsroom where I worked at the time that we shouldn’t cover everything he said or tweeted. In the past, every word of presidents was assumed to be a carefully chosen signal of future policy, and reported as such. Trump, on the other hand, clearly said a lot of things just to get a rise out of people. Reporting them, I argued, only fed the fire. Another editor backed off. He’s the president, he said, or words to that effect. He is talking about news.

Eventually, many (if not all) news outlets kicked (if not completely) the habit of amplifying every wild tweet and went back to doing their real job, which is reporting on what’s actually happening. the Trump administration is doing that it may itself be, at best, just ignorant. However, in the past few weeks, news habits from the early Trump years have resurfaced around Elon Musk.

Here, for example, we saw the rapid response to news stories about Musk’s December 11 tweet My pronouns are Prosecute/Fauci, a dig at the government’s former chief infectious disease expert, as well as gender diversity. Here’s another group about a photo of his bedside table with two replica guns, and a few more about him tweeting a far-right Pepe the Frog meme.

News coverage of what Musk is doing on Twitter betrays another trope of the Trump years. There is a large category of stories that report with a kind of obnoxious pleasure in moves that will surely!sink the platform in short order, such as the departure of advertisers and influential users. Meanwhile, there’s been a drumbeat of pieces from right-wing outlets that willfully ignore Musk’s worst behavior to argue that his slash-and-burn tactics are literally the only way to rid Twitter of excess. bureaucracy and make it profitable, as if it were a pit of vipers never before seen in the annals of corporate governance.

This is exactly the way to cover Trump. The liberal-leaning media is often drawn to stories that confirm the belief that a man so clearly unfit to be president will succeed only in bringing himself (or the country) down on fire, while the right-wing media treats his apparent egomania, corruption, and lack of interest in understanding key policy issues or actually doing the job as at best irrelevant and at worst essential qualities for reform in Washington. There’s a lot of good reporting going on at the same time, but these polarizing accounts tend to dominate the conversation. The losers are the public, whose understanding of what is actually happening across the country is constrained by inconsistent narratives surrounding the behavior of an unhinged man in the White House.

This is what is happening with Musk and Twitter. Conor Friedersdorf at theAtlantic describes an uneasy relationship between Twitter’s new owner and the myriad journalists who cover him in which the least defensible statements and assertions on all sides are relentlessly amplified in a never-ending cycle that predictably drives contempt and negative polarization.

Friedersdorf goes on to argue that critics of Musks press should give him more of the benefit of the doubt; after all, hedidban Kanye West, he refused to bring back Alex Jones, he was right that Twitter helped suppress the story about Hunter Bidens laptop that eventually turned out to be true at least, and maybe his idea of ​​amnesty for the suspended account is not such a bad way to reset the clock and rebuild general trust in the platform. But I think that strays into both-isms and misses the point.

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