The Media Research Center continued its sucking up to Elon Musk in a Feb. 11 post by Jorge Bonilla, who sought to absolve Musk of his numerous falsehoods about purported waste and fraud his Department of Government Efficiency is alleged to have uncovered:
In the early days of the Second Trump Administration, it appeared that ABC World News Tonight had taken time to reflect and reconsider their ways, toning things down from their wild subservience to Joe Biden. Well, the time for reflection has ended. And based on the network’s hysterical coverage of all things DOGE and Elon Musk, it appears that they’re back to their old ways.
Anchor David Muir has reverted to long, overwrought introductions that may as well be a brief of the upcoming report. In this case, the report was mostly correspondent Rachel Scott trying (but failing) to gotcha Musk on corruption and conflicts of interest. Absent actual corruption, Scott resorted to nasty yet familiar framing: BILLIONAIRE BAD[.] […]
Before closing out her interview with another nasty frame, Scott maliciously characterized Musk’s quick corrections to flawed communication as spreading “misinformation”:
Bonilla did not ask why Musk couldn’t be bothered to get his facts straight before making public statements instead of having to correct them later, as he had to do when he walked back his false claim that the U.S. was spending $50 million to send condoms to Gaza.
Nicholas Fondacaro served up more Musk sympathy in his Feb. 12 hate-watch of “The View”:
Just because Caryn Elaine Johnson, who does by the fake name Whoopi Goldberg, was 69 years old and Joy Behar was 82 years old, didn’t mean they were above acting like juvenile bullies. The oldest members of ABC’s Cackling Coven, The View kicked off Wednesday’s show by taking swings at Elon Musk’s 4-year-old son, mocking and bullying him for his name: “X.” At no point did any of the other cast members intervene on behalf of the child.
We don’t recall the MRC objecting when Rush Limbaugh smeared a young Chelsea Clinton as the White House dog — indeed, one writer tried to whitewash it.
Clay Waters raged in a Feb. 21 post that “PBS News Hour reporter William Brangham dumped a truckload of slime over space entrepreneur and Trump advisor Elon Musk’s head in a 10-minute news piece/hit piece that aired Thursday evening” by referencing how “colleagues and board members at his companies reported that they were increasingly concerned about Musk’s mental health and drug use, specifically the drug ketamine, which Musk says he’s prescribed to treat depressive episodes” and that he “shared extremist, hard-right views on X, endorsing the so-called Great Replacement Theory that argues Democrats want open borders to replace white voters, and he elevated antisemitic conspiracy theories.” Waters didn’t dispute the accuracy of anything Brangham reported. Tim Graham repeated Waters’ complaints about Brangham in his podcast that day, but he too refused to dispute their accuracy.
Jeffrey Lord found a Reagan-esque precursor to Musk for his Feb. 22 column:
It has been 44 years since young David Stockman left his congressional seat to become President Ronald Reagan’s wunderkind Budget cutter in chief. And here the nation finds itself again, as if nothing at all has changed.
Sitting in the Oval Office is, like Reagan, a President elected resoundingly on a platform of reforming the federal government and cutting the massive waste of government spending. At his side is a younger man who, like Stockman, has a reputation as a wunderkind budget cutter. A seriously smart genius who can help the President fulfill his campaign promise to both cut spending and reform the Goliath/behemoth that is the federal government of the United States.
And as President Trump and Elon Musk go about their task, there is the liberal media of today zeroing in on them, doing their best to, as Trump and Musk say, “drive us apart.”
Shades of the 1980’s Reagan and Stockman era. Imagine that.
Joseph Vazquez hyped the MRC’s favorite “Shark Tank” celebrity defending Musk’s pedantic demand that federal workers tell him exactly what they’ve done for the week in a Feb. 25 post:
Shark Tank star Kevin O’Leary — aka “Mr. Wonderful” — took a blowtorch to CNN and other lefties experiencing a mental collapse over emails from Elon Musk’s DOGE to federal workers asking them to give an account of their work progress.
CNN host Laura Coates tried to box O’Leary into a corner by drumming up controversy over Musk sending an initial email to workers that allegedly required only a voluntary response followed by a second mandatory email that included a threat of termination.
O’Leary’s response on the tense segment during the February 24 edition of CNN’s Laura Coates Live could be summed up by his one-liner: “Get over it.”
“First of all, if they’re not answering after two times requested, are they dead,” O’Leary snarked. “What’s wrong with that? The rational person would say, ‘Yeah it’s not okay.’”
Coates kept trying to interject but O’Leary wouldn’t let up: “You’ve got billions of dollars going out to hundreds of people — thousands, tens of thousands of people — and nobody knows if they’re A: alive. B: working. Where are they? What are they doing? There’s nothing wrong with this request.” O’Leary then utilized his own experience in the private sector, noting that he does these sorts of inquiries with his workers “every day.” “This is not unreasonable. The average person doesn’t think this is unreasonable,” O’Leary concluded, before quipping that Musk is generating furor because DOGE is “electric and controversial, got it.”
Christy revered to comedy-cop mode in a Feb. 26 post bashing Steven Colbert cheering pranks by federal employees reacting badly to Musk’s demand:
CBS’s Stephen Colbert kicked off Tuesday’s edition of The Late Show by applauding federal employees who responded with porn to Elon Musk’s email where he demanded to know five things they accomplished the previous week.
[…]As an example, Colbert recalled, “Now, case in [bleep], this recent Elon Musk email he sent out on Saturday demanding that federal employees tell him five things they did last week or they’d be fired.”
As the audience began to boo, Colbert read from a Rolling Stone article, “Employees were— [Audience Boos] That’s what they said. Employees were not thrilled, leading some to respond with ‘very rude’ emails listing fake, vulgar ‘accomplishments,’ even sending links to graphic images of sex and scatological content.’ Now, yes! Good for them. If there’s anyone out there who don’t know what scatological means: Boodily beep bop bop bap beep badoopbap—that’s poop!
Obviously, if one of Colbert’s subordinates or anyone at CBS sent their boss such a reply, Colbert would not be saying “good for them.” If you want to make the argument that federal workers really are a collection of patriotic, non-partisan civil servants who are being unfairly railroaded by Musk, sending him porn emails is the worst way to do that. This will just confirm to him that a chainsaw approach to reforming the bureaucracy is required.
David Milliken grumbled in another post that day:
MSNBC continued what has become little more than a daily repackaging of the same old vitriol against the new administration, and especially Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), on Tuesday’s episode of The 11th Hour. On a panel hosted by Stephanie Ruhle, former GOP Congressman David Jolly went off on a, by now, perfectly predictable tirade against what he termed the “Trump/Musk administration,” and made allegations of “corruption,” for which, as usual, he failed to produce evidence.
[…]He then pivoted to an assertion that since November’s election, Elon Musk’s net worth had increased more than the USAID budget, saying, “there’s a fiction to all of this.”
In reality, Elon Musk’s personal finances, relative to USAID or otherwise, had absolutely zero bearing on Trump’s rapport with ordinary Americans or lack thereof, or how the administration might or might not be delivering on its promises. If the assertion was to suggest that the money cut went to Musk, the evidence didn’t exist for that either.
In fact, a Senate report found that DOGE cuts are helping Musk’s companies evade billions of dollars in financial liabilities.
Fondacaro served up another hate-watch of “The View” in a Feb. 27 post:
The liberals are everything they accuse conservatives of being. During the Thursday edition of ABC’s The View, co-host Joy Behar went on an anti-immigrant tirade directed at billionaire Elon Musk. She viciously attacked him for being born in South Africa – something he had no choice in, accused him – without evidence – of being “pro-apartheid,” a “foreign agent” and “enemy of the United States,” and when she finally was told he was a naturalized citizen, she scoffed and wondered if he came in illegally.
Fondacaro didn’t mention that Musk has been credibly accused of violating immigration law by working in the U.S. while under a student visa.