By Tim Graham, via The Daily Signal | March 20, 2024
Everything CNN does now underlines how then-CEO Chris Licht’s doomed attempts to calm it down are almost completely forgotten.
On Monday, Oliver Darcy’s “Reliable Sources” newsletter was topped by the headline “Elon’s Reality Escape.” That’s because CNN defines what “reality” is, and “reality” has a virulent leftist bias. That bias makes you “reliable.”
Darcy’s screed began: “Elon Musk is showing the world how radicalized he has become. The billionaire, one of the most consequential figures to walk the Earth, spent another weekend swimming in the right-wing fever swamps of X.”
The occasion was Don Lemon’s arrogant and ignorant interview of Musk, which caused Musk to pull his funding of Lemon’s program. Lemon made all kinds of strange demands of Musk, especially his demand to have some control of the platform’s “content moderation” policies.
“He’s not used to having to answer to anyone,” Lemon said in a Q&A with People magazine after his self-destructive debacle, “especially someone like me, who doesn’t share his worldview, who doesn’t look like him.”
Darcy lamented: “Musk appears to be growing more intolerant of other viewpoints. While elevating right-wing extremists, he simultaneously seeks to destroy trust in credible news sources.” This is rich, since Darcy is intolerant of “right-wing extremist” viewpoints and has openly advocated deplatforming Fox News and other conservative networks. CNN’s opinions aren’t opinions; they’re “facts.” Conservative opinions are “misinformation” and “hate speech.”
Therefore, Darcy expressed horror that in his Lemon interview, “Musk equated moderating dangerous and appalling hate speech to ‘censorship.’” But what is “appalling hate speech”? In his next clause, Darcy complained Musk “bashed the press for legitimate reporting.” Was this like CNN reporting breathlessly that Donald Trump was elected by colluding with the Russian government? Did that turn out to be “legitimate”?
The horrors kept coming. Musk agreed with a user who wrote “Fake News is the Enemy of the People,” said the press is “basically the Biden cheering squad,” accused the news media of “lying” about Trump’s “bloodbath” comments, called NPR a “nice version of Pravda,” and alleged Google “manipulate[s] their search results with left-wing bias.” That certainly does sound like the conservative critique, even if we won’t describe pro-Biden news outlets as “enemies of the people.”
Is Darcy not suggesting conservatives are enemies of all that is good?
In the midst of a cascade of purple prose, Darcy concluded: “At this juncture, calling Musk a right-wing s–tposter is no longer provocative. It’s simply accurate.”
Musk is simply too powerful to be a conservative malcontent: “In his ownership of X alone, Musk controls one of the world’s most important communications platforms, spitting corrosive venom into the public discourse at a faster speed than his SpaceX rockets hurtle into orbit.” Conservatism equals “corrosive venom.”
Darcy found only a sad decline into madness: “In effect, Musk has become self-radicalized on the very website that he was forced to purchase for $44 billion, sliding deeper into the darkest and most unsavory corners of the platform that has served to only reinforce his own worldview with an echo chamber of conspiracy theorists and ego-stoking sycophants that regularly fawn at his every move, no matter how outrageous or preposterously false.”
When his rant was ended, he turned to Kara Swisher for support on “Elon’s X-tremism.” She wrote: “My takeaway is that he has devolved into a very ill-informed thinker on a number of complex topics.”
When you think a conservative critique of liberal media is “ill-informed,” you’re suggesting that reliable “information” is liberal information and “misinformation” is conservatives trying to ruin routinely flawless liberal information. Who sounds “intolerant of other viewpoints”?
Tim Graham is director of media analysis at the Media Research Center and executive editor of the blog NewsBusters.org.
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