The Media Research Center continued its Musk-fluffing in a May 22 post by Jorge Bonilla gushing that a podcast repeated the MRC’s so-called “media research” on Elon Musk:
On the most recent episode of the world’s most popular podcast, a moment made possible by the Media Research Center: Joe Rogan and Aaron Rodgers discuss the negative coverage drawn by the DOGEfather, Tesla/SpaceX founder Elon Musk.
[…]Rogan is absolutely right about the media all but refusing to cover the SpaceX rescue of our stranded astronauts beyond the bare minimum. The Elon-deranged media appear to have made it their personal mission to destroy Elon Musk and his companies.
Per the study, carried out by our own Rich Noyes and originally published on April 28th:
While more than four-fifths (82%) of the evaluative comments we tallied focused on President Trump and his policies, the networks also targeted several of the President’s top lieutenants. Topping the list: Elon Musk, whose high-profile role combating government waste was rewarded with nearly entirely negative coverage — 125 hostile comments, vs. just five supportive ones (or 96% negative spin).
Coverage wasn’t better for the Department of Government Efficiency, which garnered 97% negative coverage. There was a cycle wherein DOGE was blamed for practically everything- from layoffs to bad experiences at your local national park. This Elon-deranged coverage helped instigate violent protests that culminated in the firebombing of several Tesla service centers.
This demonization of Musk, called out by Joe Rogan, is the culmination of a process that began when Musk bought Twitter in order to protect free speech: a mission also near and dear to the Media Research Center.
The MRC tried to build a conspiracy theory around non-right-wing media coverage of getting the astronauts who had been stuck on the International Space Station for months — but didn’t ask why Musk apparently did not offer to rescue those astronauts while Joe Biden was still president.
Bonilla also embedded a tweet by his new nepo-baby boss, David Bozell, in which he asserted: “MRC was built to expose the truth.” No, the MRC was build to peddle and reinforce partisan right-wing talking points.
Alex Christy complained about a purported double standard on Musk coverage in a May 28 post:
According to a NewsBusters study, ABC, CBS, and NBC’s coverage of Elon Musk’s budget-cutting efforts at DOGE was 97 percent negative, but on Wednesday, their respective morning shows of Good Morning America, CBS Mornings, and Today found a strange new respect for Musk’s concerns about the deficit as they used him to undermine the Big Beautiful Bill recently passed by the House.
ABC’s Jay O’Brien began his report by declaring, “President Trump has been adamant he wants Republicans united behind his mega bill full of a laundry list of campaign promises. But one top ally is still not on board this morning, Elon Musk.”
[…]In the second video, Musk added, “I think a bill can be big or it could be beautiful, but I don’t know if it could be both. My personal opinion.”
Yes, it is his opinion. Conservatives are allowed to disagree with each other whether deficit reduction or investments in border security and defense should be the priority. What is not okay is for ABC reporters to simply repeat context-free Democratic talking points, which is what O’Brien proceeded to do:
The massive budget bill includes billions to renew construction of the border wall along with billions more for defense spending and an extension of Trump’s 2017 tax cuts, which government estimates find will increase the deficit by more than $4 trillion over ten years. The bill also makes significant cuts, slashing SNAP food assistance and making changes to Medicaid that could lead to 8 million Americans losing their insurance, according to early estimates.
O’Brien left out that much of that would result from the introduction of new work requirements. Additionally, deficit projections rely on the assumption that the 2017 tax law will expire, so even if the deficit remains the same, it is spun as an increase.
[…]When Musk was running DOGE on a more full time basis, the media did everything they could to portray him as some sort of heartless monster, but now that he is spending more time away from government, his concerns about the Big Beautiful Bill are treated as a perfectly natural response to high deficits because it would undermine Trump’s second-term legacy.
Christy didn’t explain why right-wing deficit hawks — like, presumably, Christy and the rest of the MRC — aren’t taking Trump to task on how much money his bill will add to the deficit.
Intern Lucas Escala took his turn on Musk defense in a May 30 post:
MSNBC’s host of All In, Chris Hayes, got the facts wrong on Thursday as he criticized Elon Musk, who was preparing to make his way out of office. As a special government employee, Musk was granted only 130 days to lead DOGE in rooting out waste and corruption within the government. In that time, Musk has cut an estimated $175 billion in unnecessary spending across the board. However, Hayes asserted that Musk’s step down had nothing to do with the expiration of his work period, but rather being a result of the fact that “No one likes the guy.”
Hayes huffed that, “Earlier this month, The Atlantic … quotes the General Counsel for the American Federation of Government Employees as saying, quote, ‘We kicked him out of town. If he had stayed in the shadows and done this stuff, who knows how bad it would have been? But no one likes the guy.’”
What exactly the American Federation of Government Employees did to ‘kick’ Musk out of the White House remains unclear. But Hayes and other Democrats are confident that his exit from office was nothing other than a complete implosion on his part.
If Escala had read a Politico report from 11 days earlier, he would know that Musk started to fall out of grace with Republicans as his slash-and-burn tactics became deeply unpopular with the American public.
Christy groused that Musk’s DOGE destruction was pointed out in a May 31 post:
New York Times columnist David Brooks did the not-so-clever trick of insisting he wasn’t saying what he was indeed saying on Friday’s edition of PBS News Hour as he reflected back on Elon Musk’s time at DOGE by comparing him to Pol Pot, Mao Zedong, and Joseph Stalin.
Host Amna Nawaz wondered, “David, how do you look at it? What’s his legacy, if we know that yet?”
Brooks declared that, “As a budget matter, you would not say he had a big effect, but he did manage to destroy NIH and USAID. And the USAID one is the one I haven’t gotten over. And so there’s folks at Boston University who count, how many people have died because of what DOGE did at USAID? And USAID was a very ill-managed organization. That’s true.”
[…]Pol Pot had people murdered because they wore glasses, Mao killed tens of millions of people in a man-made famine and political oppression, and Stalin killed around 4 million Ukrainians in a genocide that modern Russia’s inability to come to terms with Stalin’s legacy and how it helped create a separate Ukrainian national identity have resulted in 11 years of bloodshed. Stalin was also responsible for the deaths of millions more through other aspects of his tyrannical rule.
Donald Trump and Elon Musk—just like France, Germany, the United Kingdom, and others—by contrast, decided to cut foreign aid, and in the one example Brooks cites, it is arguably not even true. Brooks can’t weasel out of it by invoking the trio of genocidal tyrants and then say they are not the same.
Christy didn’t mention that it has been argued that Musk’s DOGE cuts will indeed cost lives. Instead, he took a partisan dig at public broadcasting:
As Trump goes after PBS’s federal funding, PBS insists that they are not a partisan, left-wing entity, but their main allegedly conservative commentator just made a claim so unbelievably preposterous that one can be justified in resenting having to take it seriously. Yet, because PBS wants conservative tax dollars to subsidize such claims, we must.
The MRC has been way too excited about Trump defunding public broadcasting for committing the sin of not being right-wing pro-Trump shills.