Elon Musk has the media in the palm of his hand

[lees1975]

He does something, they jump to report it. I counted last night, thirty two separate references within a two hour period of time on MSNBC, CNN and CNN's HLN.

Make this lunatic irrelevant and stop jumping every time he sneezes or goes to the bathroom.

[secondwind]

1. Amen!!

[tanyev]

2. Just like they did with Trump.

I’d say they’re like cats chasing a red laser dot, but every cat I’ve known got bored with it after awhile. They figured out they were never going to be able to catch that dot, so they just ignored it. The mainstream media has not shown an ability to learn that lesson.

[underpants]

3. 2016 before their convention he ran low on $. He declared that he was relying on free MSM coverage.

I could find this if needed. He was in that period that Romney ran into - he was going to be nominated but he couldn’t touch General election money yet. Trump’s campaign put out a statement, or it might have been a regular filing, he stated that he didn’t need to buy ads because the media would cover him for free because of course everyone loves him. At the end of the statement the campaign threw in in all caps that Trump was worth BILLIONS OF DOLLARS. That last part got more attention but he told the media exactly what and how he was using them...and they went right along.

[Hugh_Lebowski]

4. Because Musk stories, like (most) Trump stories, are cheap to produce

No investigations, reporters, or any other costs, really. Just someone writes a story about what they said on Twitter, Truth Social, or in public.

The media love them cause they provide copy, and hence click$ and eye$, for damn near free.

And they both know it.

[BootinUp]

5. You are 100% correct. nt

[dalton99a]

6. "I'm going to suck all the oxygen out of the room. I know how to work the media in a way

that they will never take the lights off of me."

- Donald Trump, 2013

[Sympthsical]

7. Because the media themselves are addicted to Twitter

One of the best things to come out of this whole dumpster fire is the unmasking of a media culture that sits online all day and gets their "news" from clicking around on random tweets and getting into slap fights with one another.

They're supposed to be the people informing the country, but instead we're watching a high school riot in the cafeteria.

If I were in charge of a major news paper or cable news network, I would ban my employees from social media spaces or at least severely curtail what they could say and do there - and how much they could depend on it for sourcing.

The thing about Twitter is, there are millions of people on it. You can write whatever article you want, find three people saying the same things, then do the, "People on Twitter spoke out about . . ." Meanwhile, the person speaking out is Rachel from Texas with four followers.

You see it constantly.

But I am loving all these mask off moments now. Musk's an egotistical shitheel (known), the media are addicted (known but unacknowledged), and people actually kind of don't like censorship when it grinds against their team ("It's a private company!" just evaporated overnight once Musk took over).

I'm not sure there's an angle to this I'm not enjoying.

[Sneederbunk]

8. We could start here on DU.

[emulatorloo]

9. Dunno, most of the articles are about what a huge fuck-up he is.

I am enjoying watching “stable genius 2.0” Musk fucking around and finding out.

[nightwing1240]

10. It seems he has

I don't care for him either but there are a lot of posts about the idiot. Don't feed the MSM and they won't feed the squirrel (in this care, Musk) Apologies to squirrels