Elon Musk had just fired Don Lemon for not sucking up to him enough during the first (and last) interview on his Twitter/X channel — an act of censorship that the Media Research Center unsurprisingly endorsed since it has no problem censoring views that don’t align with right-wing narratives. So it was more than a little galling to see the MRC’s Tom Olohan gush over Musk’s purported love of free speech in a March 20 post:
Tech mogul Elon Musk unloaded about the importance of free speech and the challenges he has faced dealing with the prior regime at X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter.
During a live conversation with Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey on March 18, Musk stressed that Americans have an unparalleled right to freedom of speech that must be protected on social media. “No country has the protection of speech that the United States does, not even Canada,” he said on X Spaces (formerly Twitter Spaces). “So that’s something we should really take pride in and seek to preserve. I think that the bedrock of democracy is freedom of speech.”
Musk emphasized the importance of free speech by discussing what motivated the Founding Fathers to write the First Amendment. “[The First Amendment] exists because people came from countries where they could not speak freely, where if they did speak their mind they would be imprisoned or killed,” Musk explained. “That’s why they were so concerned about freedom of speech. It’s because they didn’t have it in the countries they came from. In many places of the world, maybe most places, you don’t have freedom of speech.”
Musk warned about political “constraints on speech” before calling out Twitter’s extreme bias under its former CEO Parag Agrawal. Musk said that there were roughly “ten voices on the right suppressed for every one on the left” on Twitter before he took over the company. Musk described the past regime as having a “very big thumb on the political scale.”
A few days later, Bailey sued Media Matters on Musk’s behalf over its research exposing that ads from major companies were appearing next to Nazi-promoting content — demonstrating that neither of them actually care about freedom of speech and care much more about intimidating critics into silence. The MRC has censored news about that lawsuit, just like it has censored all mention of Musk’s own lawsuit against Media Matters. Olohan was also completely silent about Musk’s firing of Lemon, which would seem to put the lie to Musk’s supposed dedication to “freedom of speech.”
Olohan did some more sucking up to Musk in an April 9 post, with the help of the MRC’s favorite misinformation-spreading (and kinda racist) podcast host:
Podcast host Joe Rogan spoke up about the impact of X owner Elon Musk breaking the leftist censorship monopoly on major social media platforms.
During the April 6 edition of The Joe Rogan Experience, fellow podcaster Andrew Schultz expressed his hope that Musk’s purchase of X and decision to “uphold this soapbox of free speech” would lead to “a civil society where ideas can permeate freely.” Rogan went a step further, telling his guest that “[Musk] may have very well saved humanity in some way” by buying Twitter and reversing much of the insane censorship practices of the Old Regime. Rogan, who survived a campaign to drive him from Spotify for his speech on vaccines, is not the only person that feels this way.
Olohan is being dishonest. Rogan wasn’t criticized over a “speech on vaccines” — he was criticized for spreading falsehoods and misinformation about COVID vaccines from Malone, who has been repeatedly caught spreading misinformation. But the MRC puts narrative over facts, and Olohan continued to do what he gets paid to do by pushing that narrative — part of which involves the partisan claim that anyone who holds a right-winger accountable for his lies and misinformation is engaging in “censorship.”