The Media Research Center loves to fluff Elon Musk — and it goes to excess on occasion. Joseph Vazquez’s June 5 post bizarrely insisted that a critic of Elon Musk was drunk:
One of the most unhinged columnists at The New York Times penned such a deranged rant against X owner Elon Musk that it begs the question of whether she was drunk before she turned it in.
“Elon Musk’s Legacy Is Disease, Starvation and Death,” cried columnist Michelle Goldberg in a ridiculous May 30 screed. Apparently, what threw her off was Musk’s celebration on X in February that his DOGE team had gutted the disgraced U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). USAID has become the focal point of a major scandal due to innumerous wasteful payments in tax dollars being doled out to a litany of leftist pet projects over the years.
By having “shred” USAID, as Goldberg put it, she outlandishly accused Musk of — wait for it — killing hundreds of thousands of people in the process. Liquor is one heck of a substance, isn’t it Goldberg?
Vazquez whined about the statistics Goldberg used to back up her claims without bothering to actually disprove them:
Reviewing the so-called “methodologies” for Nichols’s research Goldberg relied on reeked of arbitrary speculation. In a nutshell, Nichols’s logic was simply: X million(s) was allocated by USAID to a health program (ex. HIV/AIDS, Malaria, etc.); the cost of treating a patient is X dollars so therefore USAID cuts would result in X number of deaths, literally exemplifying the hallmarks of hasty generalization fallacy by assuming a linear relationship between USAID tax dollars cut and deaths.
Goldberg apparently didn’t realize that Nichols’s half-cocked “Impact Metrics Dashboard” seemed to oversimplify a complex system by glossing over other variables like issues with program efficiencies, alternative funding sources, and treatment prioritization.
Vazquez went on to gush that “Musk’s inventions have largely benefited the globe, such as Starlink to help bring internet access to remote locations around the world, revolutionizing the electric vehicle industry and modernizing space exploration.” In fact, Musk is not an inventor; he’s an investor.
Bill D’Agostino played some desperate whataboutism in a June 6 post:
Back in January, when Elon Musk made an strange hand gesture which resembled a Nazi or Roman salute while celebrating President Trump’s inauguration, the corporate media were eager to conclude that Musk’s on-stage awkwardness must categorically make him a Nazi. Yet last week, when Democratic Senator Cory Booker made an identical motion at the end of a speech in California, none of those same journalists even noticed.
MRC analysts looked at all left-wing cable (CNN and MSNBC) and broadcast (ABC, CBS, NBC, and PBS) coverage in the week following both Musk’s (January 20 through January 26) and Booker’s (May 31 through June 6) odd salutes, finding that not a single on-air speaker on any of the networks bothered to mention the Democratic Senator’s faux pas. Musk’s incident, however, received ample and immediate coverage: 16 minutes and 17 seconds, all told.
D’Agostino weirdly refused to examine Fox News, apparently because right-wing channels are exempt from MRC scrutiny over bias. He also won’t tell you that Booker’s gesture as much different than Musk’s, and a Booker spokesperson noted that “The differences between the two are obvious to anyone without an agenda.” But D’Agostino has an agenda, so…
He went on to complain that ” after Musk gave a speech in front of Germany’s immigration restrictionist AFD party … no host or journalist on CNN or MSNBC has suggested the gesture was anything other than a deliberate Nazi salute.” D’agostino’s benign descripton of AfD as merely “immigration restrictionist” hides the fact that it’s actually a far-right party with Nazi-esque leanings. He further whined:
Booker, a sitting Democrat and media darling, was spared the coverage because his allies in the corporate press had no incentive to assassinate his character. This stark disparity in attention clearly indicates that the media’s selective outrage over Elon’s goofy gesture was more performative than genuine.
Is D’Agostino admitting that his purported outrage over Booker is more performative than genuine? Sure seems that way. And he’s certainly not going to remind you how aggressively his employer denied that Musk’s salute was Nazi-related, despite Musk’s clear far-right sympathies.