Some leftist anchors are mourning that X CEO Elon Musk vowed to uphold the First Amendment in the 2024 presidential election. Their complaints? So-called misinformation and Musk’s support for now-President-elect Donald Trump.
The anchors—MSNBC’s Jen Psaki, Stephanie Ruhle and Joy Reid; CNN’s Brianna Keilar, Boris Sanchez and Van Jones; and The View’s Sarah Haines—attacked Musk on election week to whine about his decision to allow free speech on the X platform. In response, Musk posted on the platform, “The legacy media wants to destroy your right to freedom of speech. They are saying it out loud and repeatedly.”
The legacy media wants to destroy your right to freedom of speech.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 8, 2024
They are saying it out loud and repeatedly. https://t.co/WX9Cr4gP2w
Psaki, a former White House press secretary and current anchor of Inside with Jen Psaki, appeared on an MSNBC panel where she seethed at Musk’s ownership of the social media platform. “You have Elon Musk, who owns Twitter, X, whatever we are calling it these days, X, who is a disinformation propagandist and now … could, potentially have a direct line to the Oval Office,” she said, following Trump's victory Tuesday night.
Before election day, Psaki laughably referred to Musk as a “bad actor” who posed a threat because he would amplify free speech. She even suggested the government should crack down on X: “And it may be time to ask ourselves things like whether social media platforms should have the freedom to operate at a lower level of accountability than local television networks in terms of the lies they can spread.”
Also before election day, Psaki sowed doubts about the spread of so-called conspiracy theories on X, asking NBC News correspondent Vaughn Hillyard: “How concerned are you or should we be about his ownership of X now, and the role it could play in spreading conspiracies?”
In response, Hillyard beseeched: “We watched Twitter, now X, essentially become a town hall of often falsehoods and conspiracy theories and pro-MAGA content and material and all of that amounted here to this moment.”
Ruhle, who hosts MSNBC’s 11th Hour with Stephanie Ruhle, claimed in response to the election results: “We have now let misinformation become the accepted information.” She went on to echo Psaki, who also expressed her distress about Musk’s ownership of X and support of the Trump campaign. “Elon Musk, he buys Twitter, and then he uses it almost exclusively to be a propaganda machine and we accepted it.”
Reid, who hosts MSNBC’s The ReidOut, called for regulation of social media platforms as votes came in on election night. “At some point doesn’t Congress need to think about some sort of regulation to not allow someone like that to play on both sides of a political election?” she asked NBC Policital Analyst David Jolly.
In response, Jolly accused Musk of fueling misinformation on the platform, he claimed, “Elon Musk raises the interesting question because he controls it and is producing the disinformation.”
Reid’s guest went on to admit, “We know the effect disinformation can have on the election.” On the contrary, most of the leftist media turned a blind eye during the Biden-Harris administration's overreach to promote social media companies in censoring their users on the platform or the release of Twitter files.
During CNN’s America’s Choice 2024 segment on Nov. 4, Sanchez and Keilar, both co-anchors of CNN News Central, cited statistics from the Center for Countering Digital Hate, a tool used by the Labor Party in the UK to suppress free speech across the globe. Attacking Musk, Sanchez said, “This is an analysis coming from the Center for Countering Digital Hate. It finds that the blizzard of misleading election claims, 87, has been viewed more than two billion times.”
Sanchez and Keilar were not alone as Jones claimed, “In a normal country, you would say… Maybe we need to have a different set of regulations for social media companies.”
Similarly, Haines, a co-host of The View, complained, “It would help if we could regulate social media, cause one of the biggest defenders is D.C. and Congress have not been able to do one thing in regard to the rogue corporations of social media.”
While these leftist anchors beseech Musk for his support of Trump and hailing free speech on the X platform, a question remains: Why did none of these journalists call for the removal of then-Twitter owner Jack Dorsey or Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg for their censorship of the Hunter Biden laptop story at the behest of the federal government?
MRC Free Speech America Assistant Editor Luis Cornelio contributed to this report.
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