When Elon Musk first floated the idea of purchasing Twitter, I don't think anyone could fully appreciate how big a deal it was or would be. At the time, many conservatives had been banned from the platform and saw his potential acquisition of Twitter as a means to having our accounts restored and being able to tweet without being censored for saying the "wrong" things. If that had been all that Musk accomplished, it would have been enough, but his purchase of Twitter, since renamed X, may very well have been a huge turning point in American discourse.
Case in point: earlier this week, Jim VandeHei, the co-founder and CEO of Axios, ranted against Musk and the platform at the National Press Club.
"Everything we do is under fire," he lamented. "Elon Musk sits on Twitter every day—or X—today saying like, 'We are the media, you are the media.' My message to Elon Musk is bulls**t. You're not the media. You having—you having a blue checkmark, a Twitter handle, and 300 words of cleverness doesn't make you a reporter. You don't do that by popping off on Twitter. You don't do that by having an opinion. You do it by doing the hard work."
NEW Axios CEO melts down over @elonmusk telling 𝕏 users “You are the media now” — mounts passionate defense of dying legacy media:
— Western Lensman (@WesternLensman) November 25, 2024
"My message to Elon Musk is b*llshit. You're not the media!"
The MSNBC panel applauds:
“Social media people lying every day, every hour, every… pic.twitter.com/SBwgI9hFfC
What VandeHei doesn't get is that the media doesn't seem interested in doing "the hard work" anymore. They have an agenda. They're the ones who covered up Joe Biden's cognitive decline for years. They're the ones who covered up the Hunter Biden laptop story. They're the ones who seem to lack the intellectual curiosity to do the hard work anymore if doing the hard work means going against their agenda. The mainstream media perpetuated the Russia collusion hoax. The New York Times and the Washington Post even got Pulitzer Prizes for their reporting. They didn't do the hard work. They pushed an agenda to serve a particular objective: undermine Donald Trump. VandeHei's complete lack of self-awareness here is almost comical.
Now, I'm not saying that on its face that VandeHei is wrong. Look, there are plenty of people on X/Twitter who report things that are completely wrong, without any accountability whatsoever. You have to be able to know who the trustworthy people on the platform are, and it is admittedly not easy, but it's not all that different from the "real" media that VandeHei thinks has some sort of monopoly on journalistic integrity. Can The View even get through an episode without being forced to read legal disclaimers?
The media simply can't handle that they have competition. And whether they like it or not, X is becoming their competition.
"There's no question that X is the platform with the greatest reach," Emmy Award-winning investigative journalist Catherine Herridge noted recently. "And when I say the greatest reach, it's not just the numbers, but it's the individuals that you can have this contact with, whether it's people who are very senior in politics, major business leaders."
She continued, "It's not just the size of the audience, it's the diversity of the audience, and it's being able to reach out to a lot of different types of people. You know, the powerful, the decision makers, but then also the everyday consumers of information. I feel like on X, the people who are following the account are a lot more engaged in the news. They're super consumers of information. You can't argue with the numbers. I had a conversation with our bureau chief in Washington, Mark Lima, and we were talking about interviews on X, and there was one in particular. I think it's like 35 or 40 million views. And he said to me, that's not a real number. And I said, well, neither is 4.5 on the evening news, but if I had to choose, I would take the 40 million views on X over the 4.5 million views on the evening news, because that's where the growth is, that's where the diverse audience is. And I feel like this is the next chapter for media."
“The data doesn’t lie.”
— Catherine Herridge (@C__Herridge) November 29, 2024
30 million engagements on @X versus 4.5 million “viewers” on Network Evening News.@X is where the growth is.
That's where the diverse audience is.
“I feel like this is the next chapter for media.”
Our 22+ minute subscribers only interview also… pic.twitter.com/RVUsFGjvt3
The influence of X on public discourse can't be denied. And the mainstream media is terrified of this. I strongly believe that had Musk never bought Twitter in 2022, this would never have happened.
