Topic: Media Research Center
Because the Media Research Center is a PR agent for Elon Musk, it's not going to tell you about the repeated outages on the site since he fired most of its employees, or that he publicly mocked a disabled employee who wasn't sure if he still had a job (he was eventually shamed into apologizing to the guy and inviting him to keep working for Twitter). And it's certainly not going to tell you that anti-Semitic content on Twitter has increased since he bought the platform. Butthere was another "Twitter files" selective release to tout, and Catheroine Salgado did the PR duties in a March 17 post:
Twitter actually censored true content to protect trust in supposed “authoritative sources” like ex-National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Dr. Anthony Fauci, according to installment nineteen of The Twitter Files.
Journalist Matt Taibbi exposes in what he called “The Great Covid-19 Lie machine,” which consisted of a combination of tyrannical government agencies, Stanford University’s Virality Project (VP) “and a slew of (often state-funded) NGOs” monitoring social media companies to censor COVID-19 content. These groups worked, often in a concerted effort, to suppress content that promoted natural immunity, critiqued the COVID-19 vaccines and vaccine passports and that pointed out breakthrough cases in those that had received COVID-19 vaccinations. Some of the content that was censored not only turned out to be true in retrospect, but was admittedly determined to be true by the very groups involved in suppressing the content. As Taibbi put it, “The [Virality P]roject's central/animating concept was, ‘You can't handle the truth.’”
“The level of hubris from those involved in the ‘Great Covid-19 Lie Machine’ is stunning,” stated MRC Free Speech America & MRC Business Director Michael Morris. “The idea that anyone, let alone a university and government officials, would knowingly suppress information regarding the health and safety of Americans is beyond the pale.”
Neither Taibbi nor Salgado mentioned that promoting "natural immunity" -- read: catching COVID and hope it didn't kill you -- was dangerous at a time when vaccines were not widespread and that COVID was still powerful and widespread enough that was killing thousands of people a day.
Also much more newsworthy at the MRC than system and personnel issues at Twitter is that Musk is now responding to press inquries wit a poop emoji. Luis Cornelio gushed in a March 20 post under the immature headline "Elon Musk Takes Dump on Media":
Twitter owner Elon Musk has found a new way to troll his opponents in the liberal media with a healthy dose of toilet humor.
It’s not a question that Musk has been subject to relentless liberal media hit jobs after voicing support for fair and free speech on Twitter. Musk unveiled a funny joke to get back at leftist reporters and Twitter users can bet that it will be a smelly situation for the press: automatic poop emoji responses to media inquiries.
Musk announced the auto-responses to press inquiries in a Mar. 19 tweet. “press@twitter.com now auto responds with 💩,” tweeted Musk.
Salgado hyped another suck-up to Musk in a March 23 post:
Popular podcaster Joe Rogan bashed legacy media and praised independent journalists in a recent show. The Twitter Files is one of the biggest exclusive series in America now, broken by independent journalists.
Independent Substack journalist The Vigilant Fox shared a clip of Joe Rogan on his verified Twitter account March 21. In the clip, Joe Rogan praised independent journalists and slammed “mainstream media” as beholden to advertising revenue and the companies that provide the revenue.
Salgado still hasn't figured out that if writers like Taibbi were hand-picked by Musk and are reporting only what Musk allows them to, they're not "independent journalists."
Renata Kiss used a March 30 post to take a gentle shot at Donald Trump for not immediately returning to Twitter after Musk reinstated his account:
As the 2024 elections heat up, former President Donald Trump didn’t shy away from endorsing the prowess of his own social media platform over Elon Musk’s contentious Twitter.
On the Tuesday edition of Hannity on Fox News, Trump gushed about the success of his social media platform Truth Social, while he seemed to drag his feet on using Twitter again.
“I love Truth (Social). I think Truth is incredible,” he said. “It’s up, I think, 389 percent, it’s the hottest thing there is.” When asked if he would ever go back on Twitter, the former president replied, “Well, we’ll talk about that at some point. Now I use Truth (Social), although they want me back on Twitter desperately,” he said.
Kiss didn't mention that Truth Social is not, in fact, successful as a business, having trouble paying its bills and is being kept afloat only through the good graces of pro-Trump billionaires. She also didn't mention that the main reason Trump has not returned to Twitter is because he's contractually obligated to post his musings at Truth Social first and can't repost them elsewhere until six hours later.
Instead of telling her readers the full truth, she complained that "During the tumultuous 2020 elections, Twitter permanently suspended President Trump’s Twitter account in 2021 dubiously claiming that he helped incite the Jan. 6, Capitol Hill riot." In fact, there's nothing at all "dubious" about the claim -- the evidence Trump incited the riot is pretty clear.
