A recent New York Times article (12/10/22) describing Twitter owner Elon Musk’s politics—which have clearly aligned with Fox News (12/11/22, 12/12/22) and the Trumpian right—as “tricky to pin down” has people wondering if the Times is paying close attention to the news.
While reporter Jeremy Peters admitted that Musk promoted anti-left theories and rails against wokeness, he said “his enthusiasm for Republicans has been more muted.” While Musk supported Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis for president, Peters wrote, “his endorsement was not especially resounding,” because he “merely replied ‘Yes’ when someone on Twitter asked him.”
It was perhaps bad luck for Peters that the day after his piece dropped, Musk tweeted, “My pronouns are Prosecute/Fauci”—signaling affinity for a red-meat issue for Covid conspiracy theorists while at the same time ridiculing trans rights (CBS, 12/11/22). But Peters and the rest of the Times had enough evidence at the time of publication to call into question the article’s key assertion that Musk’s politics can’t be easily defined as conservative.
Class-war villain
Under Musk’s management, Twitter has silenced left-wing accounts while trumpeting his commitment to free speech (Intercept, 11/29/22). He’s reopened far-right accounts, including that of the publisher of the Nazi Daily Stormer (Tech Crunch, 12/2/22); unsurprisingly, hate speech on the site has soared (New York Times, 12/2/22).
Twitter just eliminated its Trust and Safety Council, an “advisory group of around 100 independent civil, human rights and other organizations that the company formed in 2016 to address hate speech…and other problems on the platform” (AP, 12/13/22). Committee to Protect Journalists President Jodie Ginsberg (12/12/22) called the move a “cause for grave concern,” because it is “coupled with increasingly hostile statements by Twitter owner Elon Musk about journalists and the media.”
Intercept (11/29/22): “Several prominent antifascist organizers and journalists have had their accounts suspended in the past week, after right-wing operatives appealed directly to Musk to ban them.”
Internally, as a boss, Musk in his short tenure at Twitter has been an archetypal class-war villain. He remains staunchly anti-union (CNBC, 8/29/22). Janitors at Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters went on strike (CBS, 12/6/22), and “a top lieutenant of Elon Musk allegedly told a fired member of Twitter’s cleaning staff that his job would one day be done by robots” (New York Post, 12/9/22). He has threatened to sue Twitter employees who leak information about the company (Fortune, 12/10/22), despite the fact that Musk himself released confidential emails and memos in an effort to discredit the company’s former management.
Musk enlisted ideologically sympathetic writers Bari Weiss and Matt Taibbi to publicize internal Twitter documents relating to the company’s handling of possibly hacked information (Above the Law, 12/9/22) about President Joe Biden’s son Hunter.
Weiss and Taibbi unloaded these documents in a series of tweets (12/2/22, 12/8/22) that were “saturated in hyperbole, marred by omissions of context, and discredited by instances of outright mendacity,” New York (12/10/22) reported, while Musk’s personal hyping of the leaks “proved even more demagogic and deceptive than the exposés themselves.” Nevertheless, the “Twitter files,” as these information dumps are called, are being used in the right-wing press as evidence of a corporate and government conspiracy to silence conservative voices (Wall Street Journal, 12/4/22; New York Post, 12/8/22; The Hill, 12/11/22).
Musk flatly stated his support for the Republicans in the most recent congressional races (Bloomberg, 11/7/22). When asked why he had a strained relationship with his trans daughter, his answer was “communism” (Advocate, 10/11/22).
Running interference
The New York Times‘ Jeremy Peters (4/16/22) has previously marveled that a professed libertarian could accept corporate subsidies.
The question, then, is why would the Times, thought to be a moderate liberal beacon against the rightward Republican march, run interference for the world’s (then) richest human, whose takeover of a major social media website is heralded by the right as a victory in the culture war (Fox News, 10/28/22; New York Post, 12/12/22)? This latest piece only reinforces the feeling among the paper’s left-wing critics that the paper is hopelessly devoted to protecting the 1%.
Consider, for a moment, the context in which this piece dropped. NewsGuild of New York members at the Times recently staged a one-day walkout, highlighting the paper’s failure to reach a new collective bargaining agreement with the union (CNN, 12/7/22). A.G. Sulzberger, New York Times Co. chair and the paper’s publisher, has displayed his class loyalties in this ongoing dispute with the paper’s workers; the company boasts an increase in profit (New York Times, 11/2/22) and Sulzberger’s pay has increased (NPR, 12/8/22) while he and the company resist the unions. One can imagine the Times is reluctant to portray hostility to unions as a right-wing trait.
A recent profile of Starbucks boss Howard Schultz (12/11/22) likewise described his hostility to unionization as an “emotional” devotion to his company, rather than just cold business calculus. This is meant to humanize Schultz’s callous attacks on workers, but any labor journalist or union organizer could have told the Times that this sentiment is common among bosses who resist unionization.
Peters, the author of the Musk piece, essentially wrote this same article earlier this year (New York Times, 4/16/22): listing Musk’s supposed political contradictions, like the fact that he has “railed against federal subsidies” while his “companies have benefited from billions of dollars in tax breaks and other incentives from federal, state and local governments.” Again, as economic progressives have complained for decades, this is a common hypocrisy of corporate barons: They’ll gladly accept corporate subsidies while opposing welfare for the masses.
‘A new kind of polity’
If anything, it was the conservative Times columnist Ross Douthat (12/10/22) who got to the heart of the matter, noting a “sense in which Twitter is a new kind of polity,” which leads to a heated response to Musk’s takeover because “the leadership change really affects how people experience their daily lives.”
Indeed, even if one chooses not to log on, Twitter drives a lot of political and cultural discussion in the press, giving the platform an enormous amount of power. The fact that one of the world’s richest humans has used his unmatched purchasing power to turn the site into an extension of the right-wing movement like Fox News is not something individuals can simply ignore. As BBC contributor Matthew Sweet (Twitter, 12/11/22) put it, “It’s like Alex Jones bought the postal system.”
And so if the New York Times wants to be seen as a bulwark against the disinformation and the illiberalism of the Trumpian right, it needs to be more honest and skeptical in its reporting of Musk, who, whether we like it or not, is one of the most powerful right-wing figures in the world at this point.
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When mulling the Times’ motives
Class is never dismissed
The NYT speaks for the (mostly) New York and east coast establishment elites on Wall Street and in Washington D.C. I said “mostly” because they’re extra hard on Wells Fargo (San Francisco based) and extra easy on Jamie Dimon and the felonious “bank” he runs, JP Morgan Chase.
In any case the NYT represents the thinking of the 1% and always has with an occasional investigative piece thrown in to keep up their cred with middle class left-leaning moderates in other big cities.
What I found funny about this FAIR article was that in a piece criticizing the NYT, you made hyperlinked references to several NYT articles to back your points.
I actually unsubbed from Taibbi’s Substack after the way he promoted this nothingburger of a “scoop” playing it up like it was the next big Snowden or Wikileaks expose. The guy has gotten filthy rich on Substack and stopped writing good investigative journalism in book form, which is a big disappointment. In fact he removed mention of his book “I Can’t Breathe” from his profile in order not to offend his newfound rightwing and rabid anti-woke followers.
Mark Ames has his own page and did a podcast with a few other guys who know Matt last week, and it was pretty enlightening. As mentioned, Matt – a guy who grew up relatively wealthy and having access to the rich, famous and powerful through his father – suddenly struck it rich with his Substack reporting in a way that he never did from selling important books.
In a manner similar to Greenwald (who admittedly still does good reporting on Brazilian matters) who got famous on the basis of the aforementioned Snowden leaks, Taibbi has sniffed the filthy lucre and is now carefully massaging his persona and work in order to appeal to the types of people who PAY for right- or anti-left content online (i.e., Republican voters) and it’s paying off handsomely. I really do recommend subscribing to Yasha Levine or Mark Ames if you want honest investigative journalism and commentary rather than hyped up junk sometimes mixed with real news and information.
“saturated in hyperbole, marred by omissions of context, and discredited by instances of outright mendacity,” Looks like Musk took a page from FAIR’s book,
… without any evidence from you. If you detest FAIR, why are you reading it? I don’t read The Sun or the Mail Online.
Journalist’s dependence on platforms like Twitter are actually at the heart of this problem. Just say no to Twitter, and ignore the people who stay on it, and it’s problem solved! Exactly why do people who have publishing platforms need to use this stupid app? Grow up folks, Tweeting is not the mature way to discuss the issues of the day.
Oh that horse left the barn sometime ago. In fact, it began with Facebook and migrated to not only to twitter but a host of other social media platforms. This type of exhausting, hyperbolic dialogue fits right in on classic social media.
There’s the left, and then there’s the “woke”, pejoratively understood or not. The twitter cancellation crew are not modern monetary theorists or union organizers.
That distinction is lost in the Times’ Musk coverage, but assuming as a matter of course, as this author does, that ridicule of “my pronouns” is tantamount to a fascist salute doesn’t help either. Like it or not, “the left” is not homogeneous. If that’s intolerable, the question is, who gets to expel whom?
Your use of the term “Covid conpiracy theorists” turns me off to pretty much everything else you say. So you think it’s out of ignorance that some people would like to really know the actual origin of the SARS- CoV-2 virus? What’s really ignorance, is not questioning. It has nothing to do with right or left wing politics. It has to do with having enough intelligence to question. I don’t care about Elon Musk, but, after reading this, I certainly wouldn’t rely on you to enlighten me on much of anything.
Good points. If you Don t agree with them you are a conspiracy theorist. Russia, Russia, Russia is still a conspiracy. Hunter s lap top is still Russian mis information. They are either just slow learners, or flat liers.
Agreed.
The only rational thing to do is boycott Twitter and grind its business into dust. Facebook as well, Mike Liston
NYT’s tepid reporting on Musk’s evisceration of anti-reactionary opinion on Twitter can only be based on a desire to preserve its access to the platform. Sulzberger and his staff know that Musk could easily ban them and have clearly decided not to take that risk. It’s as simple as that. The rest of us can boycott the remaining advertisers on Twitter and unfollow NYT too, until we too decide to cut the cord to musk’s Folly. The more of us that do these things, the more irrelevant it becomes.
Teslon smells like a guy whio swims in a swimming pool of dollar bills every morning.
Analysis of dollar bills shows that they have a high amount of drugs & bodily fluids on them.
That’s the ‘Musk’ of the “crytpo conservative” “but not so crypto nobody can tell” crowd. They smell like fraud rich.
Musk, Big Oil, Dark Money, Murdoch, Heritage, Trump, Ye Merry Men — They are like a human centipede.