Journalists love nothing more than to be slapped around, so Elon Musk’s sustained caning of them during the past few weeks has brought nothing but sunshine and smiles to newsrooms all over America. Directing his Twitter ack-ack at the press all day Tuesday, the tech titan behind Tesla and SpaceX blamed the press for the election of Donald Trump, damned reporters as “holier-than-thou” hypocrites, and pitched the idea for a media-rating site called Pravda that would assess the credibility of news outlets.
“Problem is journos are under constant pressure to get max clicks & earn advertising dollars or get fired,” Musk tweeted. “Anytime anyone criticizes the media, the media shrieks ‘You’re just like Trump!’” he added, dismissing the reporters from Reveal who had published an expose of safety conditions at the Tesla plant as “some rich kids in Berkeley who took their political science prof too seriously.”
While stitching close the wounds that his blows had opened on its psyche, the press corps repelled Musk’s attack with blanket coverage in the New York Times, CNN, Time, the Washington Post, the BBC, Vanity Fair, BuzzFeed, and elsewhere that made him look like a peevish nut.
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