An April 23 post by Media Research Center intern Christian Baldwin carries the misleading headline “WATCH: The Absurd Reason This Senator Claims Elon Musk ‘Should Be in Jail’.” Despite what Baldwin is suggesting, the senator in question is in Australia, not the U.S. From there, Baldwin is angry that Australian government officials are trying to remove videos of acts of violence — essentially snuff films of people getting stabbed — off Twitter/X:
Elon Musk has been targeted by yet another authoritarian government for his company X’s reluctance to censor political content.
In an April 23 interview with Sky News, Tasmanian Senator Jacqui Lambie appeared to threaten Elon Musk over his well-known advocacy for free speech and the way his company X handles political content on its platform, specifically X’s refusal to censor videos of recent attacks in Australia, contradicting the orders of the country’s eSafety commission.
Lambie engaged in a vitriolic spree against the tech mogul and considerably blackened his character.
“So when it comes to the tech billionaire, like I’ve already said, I think he’s a social media nob with no social conscience,” Lambie said. “He has absolutely no social conscience.”
The senator then proceeded to issue explicit threats against Musk, advocating for him to be imprisoned.
“Someone like that should be in jail, and the key be thrown away,” Lambie asserted. “That bloke should not have a right to be out there on his own ideology platform and creating hatred, you know, showing all this stuff out there to our kids and all the rest.”
[…]The controversy comes after X was ordered by Grant on April 16 to take down two videos of stabbings.
One video depicted a bishop and a priest being stabbed during a live-streamed mass, and the other video showed a knife-wielding assailant killing six at a mall. X refused to comply with the request because its Global Government Affairs team argued that the request was not within the scope of Australian law nor did the videos violate X’s own policies.
Baldwin didn’t explain why the world needs to see these snuff videos, or why people must have these snuff videos freely available to them. The rest of the MRC hasn’t explained their lust for blood either.
Meanwhile, Jeffrey Lord used his April 27 column to rehash an old controversy:
Uri Berliner’s expose of the ideological unanimity at NPR reminds the Republican half of America that they send their taxpayer dollars to Washington to have their viewpoints excluded or ridiculed as “far right” hate.
Back there in the Stone Age of 2023, Elon Musk, he of X that is formerly Twitter, antagonized NPR and PBS because – ready? Musk had made some changes to “state-affiliated” media designations, applying the term to both of those outlets. They’re state-funded, but not state-affiliated?
While stripping the designation from media outlets tied to governments like those of Russia and Iran, Musk had the nerve – the nerve! – to apply it to, among others, America’s NPR and PBS along with the UK’s BBC and Canada’s CBC.
As we pointed out at the time but Lord won’t — he cited only articles from the MRC and the even more right-wing-biased Western Journal, so he has no interest in telling the full story — Musk’s arbitrary relabeling violated Twitter’s own definition of “state-affiliated media” and ignored the fact that the government does not dictate the content of those outlets. Instead, Lord served up a misleading argument:
There was an easy and obvious way for NPR and PBS to answer Musk’s criticism and get out from under his “state-affiliated” designation once and for all.
That would be: Stop taking money from the government. Period. Stop taking any money from any government apparatus. Period. Make the “P” in NPR and PBS stand not for “Public” – aka taking government funds – but rather “P” as in “Private.” As in “National Private Radio” and “Private Broadcasting Service.”
All of which would make NPR and PBS a genuine private sector competitor with the rest of the American private sector free market in the world of television and radio broadcasting.
Lord forgot to mention that Musk eventually dropped the “state-affiliated media” labeling completely — not just for PBS and NPR but also for outlets that clearly are state propaganda (which the state-run Russian outlet RT was very happy about). That completely defeated the purpose of Musk’s own-the-libs tweaking of those outlets.
Lord and Musk want you to think that government funding equals government — something that, again, neither have proven in the case of NPR and PBS. If it was, their content would have changed during the Trump years — which it didn’t. (And Lord and the MRC would have cheered such biased content).