MRC Defends Musk’s Dumping Of Don Lemon From X After Contentious Interview

Elon Musk and his Twitter/X has had an eventful past several weeks:

• A new book detailed Musk’s chaotic actions before and after he bought Twitter and his sense of entitled arrogance as an extremely wealthy man.
• Matt Taibbi — whose “Twitter files” stenography on behalf of Musk the MRC absolutely loved — released unhinged messages from Musk from last year, when Twitter was shadowbanning links to Substack, Taibbi’s main meal ticket. The MRC has never told readers about Taibbi’s falling out with Musk.
• Musk met with Donald Trump, whose presidential campaign is a little short of cash. Musk later insisted he would not donate to either Trump or President Biden, even though his actions in running Twitter/X pretty much look like an in-kind contribution to Trump.
• Artificial intelligence firm OpenAI responded to Musk’s lawsuit against it over alleging that the company (which Musk co-founded) was abandoning its nonprofit mission by releasing emails showing that Musk acknowledged the company needed lots of money to power its AI ambitions.

The Musk fanboys at the MRC didn’t want to talk about any of this, of course, preferring to complain that Musk’s absurdly lucrative contract as a part-time CEO for Tesla was overruled in court and to fret that Musk allegedly isn’t making Twitter/X right-wing enough. And for a while, it also didn’t want to talk about the deal Musk and Twitter/X made with Don Lemon to host a news show there, whose firing last year from CNN the MRC heartily cheered. It was only after Musk killed the deal following a contentious interview with Lemon that the MRC had something to say — and, of course, blamed Lemon for the deal going south (and not Musk for, you know, being unable to handle criticism). Nicholas Fondacaro cheered the dumping in a March 14 post:

After almost a year of living in obscurity after being fired by CNN, disgraced primetime host Don Lemon was set to return as a political commentator with a show that would premier exclusively on X; with owner Elon Musk being his first guest. But the dream arraignment was over before it really started as Musk killed the deal after Lemon conducted a 90-minute interview that was apparently rather contentious. With their deal torn up, Lemon sprinted to his former employer to whine and claim Musk didn’t really value free speech.

Despite CNN being largely opposed to the idea of free speech (often only favoring the freedom if the press portion of the First Amendment), OutFront host Erin Burnett started off her show by trying to paint Musk as a hypocrite. “Now, this decision coming as Musk had, of course, publicly courted Lemon and has repeatedly made a commitment to free speech when he bought Twitter again and again and again,” she said, following up with a montage of instances of Musk talking about free speech.

In explaining “what happened,” Lemon admitted that there were “tense” moments during the interview and attacked Musk’s commitment to free speech. “Free speech is only important when someone you don’t like, or I would say someone who doesn’t have your same point of view are — someone is — if they’re allowed to speak freely and to say their point of view,” he bloviated. “Apparently, that doesn’t matter to Elon Musk. It’s just for maybe talking points for him or rhetoric…”

Lemon, a documented race baiter, might have also tried to make the flare-up about race because he suggested Musk didn’t like getting “questions about him from people like me.”

Fondacaro went on to whine about Lemon’s tough questions to Musk:

In the clips cherry-picked to be shown on CNN, Lemon accused Musk of being a racist, scrutinized the kind of medical prescriptions Musk received from his doctor, and suggested he might be funneling money to former President Donald Trump.

Lemon and Burnett made it clear the intent was to harm Musk and his businesses, particularly those that intersected with his government contract work. Despite eventually admitting Musk had passed every random drug test he’s ever been subjected to and they “don’t have any evidence,” they tried to portray the eccentric billionaire as a hardcore junkie akin to Hunter Biden[.]

Fondacaro made sure to let Musk have the last word:”In a comment posted on his platform hours before Burnett’s show aired but was never cited, Musk explained: ‘[Lemon’s] approach was basically just ‘CNN, but on social media’, which doesn’t work, as evidenced by the fact that CNN is dying.'” Fondacaro didn’t explain why all this did not make Musk a hypocrite.

Fondacaro hopped on the rumor mill for a March 18 post:

Disgraced media figure Don Lemon reportedly viewed billionaire Elon Musk, and his social media platform X, as a goose that would lay him a golden egg after CNN ousted him. According to reports, Lemon had made exorbitant and ridiculous demands in his negotiations to air his show on X. And when the deal fell apart after Musk pulled the plug, the billionaire compared Lemon to spoiled brat Veruca Salt from the movie Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.

According to reporting from Ariel Zilber of the New York Post, Lemon’s “astronomical wish list to Elon Musk” included “a free Tesla Cybertruck, a $5 million upfront payment on top of an $8 million salary, an equity stake in the multibillion-dollar company,” and the ridiculous demand to have “the right to approve any changes in X policy as it relates to news content.”

Those demands sounded like a far cry from Lemon’s claims to CNN last week that his agreement with X was just a “distribution” deal.

[…]

The vice chairman of the “talent” agency Lemon utilized, United Talent Agency, denied the allegations. “This is absolute, complete utter nonsense without an iota of truth to it,” Jay Sures told The Post.

It’s worth noting that The Post viewed documents that backed up their reporting.

In a post on X roughly an hour after the newspaper published their article about Lemon’s demands, Musk took a swipe at Lemon by comparing him to the spoiled girl from Willy Wonka who demanded a golden-egg-laying goose and an Oompa Loompa.

Fondacaro offered no reason why anyone should believe Musk or the New York Post at face value, given that both have agendas. And as Lemon later pointed out, “people negotiate all the time,” so even if it is true — proof of which has yet to surface — there’s no evidence any of this ever went past the discussion stage.

Tim Graham hurled a lot of wild overgeneralization and whataboutism — particularly aimed at MRC-hated CNN reporter Oliver Darcy for the offense of weighing in on the Lemon-Musk battle — in his March 20 column:

Everything CNN does now underlines how Chris Licht’s doomed attempts to calm it down are almost completely forgotten. On September 18, Oliver Darcy’s “Reliable Sources” newsletter was topped by the headline “Elon’s Reality Escape.” Because CNN defines what “reality” is, and “reality” has a virulent leftist bias. That bias makes you “Reliable.” 

Darcy’s screed began: “Elon Musk is showing the world how radicalized he has become. The billionaire, one of the most consequential figures to walk the Earth, spent another weekend swimming in the right-wing fever swamps of X.”

The occasion was Don Lemon’s arrogant and ignorant interview of Musk, which caused Musk to pull his funding of Lemon’s program. Lemon made all kinds of strange demands of Musk, especially his demand to have some control of the platform’s “content moderation” policies. 

“He’s not used to having to answer to anyone,” Lemon said in a Q&A with People magazine after his self-destructive debacle, “especially someone like me who doesn’t share his worldview, who doesn’t look like him.”

Darcy lamented: “Musk appears to be growing more intolerant of other viewpoints. While elevating right-wing extremists, he simultaneously seeks to destroy trust in credible news sources.” This is rich, since Darcy is intolerant of the “right-wing extremist” viewpoints and has openly advocated deplatforming Fox News and other conservative networks. CNN’s opinions aren’t opinions, they’re “facts.” Conservative opinions are “misinformation” and “hate speech.” 

Graham offered no evidence whatsoever to back up his claim that the interview was “arrogant and ignorant” — indeed, neither he nor Fondacaro quoted anything that was actually said during the interview. Instead, he whined that Darcy criticized Musk’s increasing right-wing extremism:

In the midst of a cascade of purple prose, Darcy concluded: “At this juncture, calling Musk a right-wing s**tposter is no longer provocative. It’s simply accurate.”

Musk is simply too powerful to be a conservative malcontent: “In his ownership of X alone, Musk controls one of the world’s most important communications platforms, spitting corrosive venom into the public discourse at a faster speed than his SpaceX rockets hurtle into orbit.” Conservatism equals “corrosive venom.”

Darcy found only a sad decline into madness: “In effect, Musk has become self-radicalized on the very website that he was forced to purchase for $44 billion, sliding deeper into the darkest and most unsavory corners of the platform that has served to only reinforce his own worldview with an echo chamber of conspiracy theorists and ego-stoking sycophants that regularly fawn at his every move no matter how outrageous or preposterously false.”

For all that whining, Graham made no effort to disprove anything Darcy said. He concluded by pretending that Musk is a lucid media critic:

When his rant was ended, he turned to Kara Swisher for support on “Elon’s X-tremism.” She wrote: “My takeaway is that he has devolved into a very ill-informed thinker on a number of complex topics.”

When you think a conservative critique of liberal media is “ill-informed,” you’re suggesting that reliable “information” is liberal information and “misinformation” is conservatives trying to ruin routinely flawless liberal information. Who sounds “intolerant of other viewpoints”?

Again, Graham provided no reason for anyone to take Musk seriously as someone who offers “a conservative critique of liberal media” — he’s just happy that Musk is parroting the correct right-wing talking points. Then again, Graham probably thinks his own brand of evidence-free ranting is cogent “media criticism.”