Topic: Media Research Center
As Elon Musk's attempted purchase of Twitter took even more turns, the Media Research Center continued in Musk her-worship mode. A Sept. 20 post by Autumn Johnson noted that "Former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey reportedly gave a deposition Tuesday for the ongoing lawsuits between the company and Elon Musk," and a Sept. 30 post by Johnson repeated Musk's usual complaints about the number of bot accounts on Twitter.
When Musk suddenly flip-flopped and declared he would buy Twitter after all following months of trying to get out of the $44 billion purchase deal he agreed to earlier this year, the MRC stayed on Team Elon. Joseph Vazuez wrote in an Oct. 4 post:
The world’s richest man just shattered the internet again by reportedly agreeing to proceed with his $44 billion acquisition deal for Twitter.
Bloomberg News reported that Tesla CEO Elon Musk is now “proposing to buy Twitter Inc. for the original offer price of $54.20 a share.”
The outlet continued: “Musk made the proposal in a letter to Twitter, according to the people who asked not to be identified discussing confidential information.” Twitter shares reportedly “climbed as much as 18% on the news, after trading was briefly halted.”
MRC President Brent Bozell responded to the news on Twitter: “I can see why Elon Musk would turn his back on the lying leftists at Twitter, but for the sake of free speech I hope this deal still happens.”
This new development in the Musk-Twitter saga follows a protracted back-and-forth legal battle between the leftist Big Tech platform and Musk over Twitter’s transparency on the amount of bot accounts active on its platform. The whole ordeal caused Musk to initially move to nix the acquisition.
Johnson spouted a few hours later:
Liberals are having an epic meltdown on Twitter after the platform reportedly reached an agreement with Tesla CEO Elon Musk for Musk to finally acquire the platform.
[...]
After the news went public, several prominent liberals expressed apparent outrage over the deal’s pending success.
Adam Parkhomenko, a self-described strategist for the Democratic Party, tweeted that Musk would shut liberal accounts down to silence them.
“Elon Musk didn’t like that we were all laughing at him for being a gutless chickenshit so he’s going to buy twitter and shut us all up,” he tweeted.
Neither Vazquez nor Johnson admitted that Parkhomenko was hinting at the truth: As the Washington Post reported, Musk's complaints about too many bot accounts was negated by the fact that he waived due diligence before signing the purchase deal and, as another observer noted, Musk knew all about the bot-account issue before signing the deal and the only real legal options he had was to pay Twitter billions to back out of the deal or to just buy the company at the price to which he agreed.
The MRC reprised its usual agenda items:
- An Oct. 5 post by Clay Waters complained that a New York Times reporter "who shares a censorious streak with many of his tech colleagues, reacted with dismay on the news that space entrepreneur Elon Musk’s on-again, off-again courtship of social media platform Twitter is back on again."
- Johnson huffed in an Oct. 6 post that "Twitter has reportedly declined Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s renewed offer to purchase the platform for $44 billion in an effort to keep the trial going," ignoring the fact that Musk's dishonest, erratic behavior doesn't exactly engender trust.
- P.J. Gladnick wrote in an Oct. 7 post that a Politico article was "freaking out" over a "fear that Musk will ditch censorship at Twitter." Of course, what Gladnick calls "censorship" most normal people call "content moderation" done to curtail extremism and improve the user experience -- which Twitter, as a private company, has every right to do (though Gladnick didn't concede that inconvenient fact).
While it was in Musk hero-worship mode, the MRC stayed silent on new Musk controversies, like his apparent communication with Vladimir Putin that resulted in him tweeting a "peace plan" between Russia and Ukraine that would call for Russia to give up Crimea and other land in its country, womething that didn't go over well with most freedom-loving people, including one particular Ukranian diplomat. Musk also advised that China aborb Taiwan into a "special administrative zone" like Hong Kong -- after which China awarded tax breaks to Tesla cars being sold in the country. The MRC also stayed silent about Musk taking a shot at Donald Trump's Truth Social operation -- bad news about which the MRC is also censoring -- as a biased right-wing "echo chamber."
Johnson found a new Musk thing to gush over in an Oct. 20 post:
Elon Musk will reportedly eliminate around 5,500 Twitter employees when his acquisition of the company is complete.
The Washington Post reported Thursday that Musk’s purchase is a “golden ticket for the struggling company” that will “potentially help[] its leadership avoid painful announcements that would have demoralized the staff and possibly crippled the service’s ability to combat misinformation, hate speech and spam.”
The report said the layoffs could save Twitter hundreds of millions of dollars, and added that Musk has told insiders that he is paying too much for Twitter.
“'Although, obviously, myself and the other investors are obviously overpaying for Twitter right now, the long-term potential for Twitter in my view is an order of magnitude greater than its current value,'” he reportedly said.
Johnson didn't mention that Musk was the one who agreed to overpay for Twitter, so he really has nothing to complain about, especially since he's more than rich enough that he can easily afford to do so.
