Welcome to the Muskification of Media | Opinion
While celebrating Donald Trump 's victory early Wednesday morning at the president-elect's private club, the richest man in the world, Elon Musk , posted "You are the media" to the social media site he owns and which he had spent recent months instrumentalizing in the service of the Republican candidate for president. And he's right.
Musk's worldview is winning—call it the Muskification of media, where everyone has a voice, but no one knows the truth. Where everyone has access to limitless information, but much of it is junk. Where preposterous rumors and bombastic assertions are rewarded, but measured reportage is devalued. It's Musk's world, and the media are living in it.
There is little doubt that the news media are among the biggest losers of this week's election. This isn't even a hot take. The morning after the election, the conservative Federalist's top headline was '2024's Biggest Loser Is the Corporate Media Industrial Complex." The Columbia Journalism Review put it more succinctly: "Trump Wins, the Press Loses." Recriminations of the media are being peppered liberally throughout the postmortems of Kamala Harris 's campaign.
Trump won the White House while bypassing the traditional news media, ignoring requests for "serious" interviews in favor of cozy chats with friendly right-wing podcasters and Youtubers. Meanwhile he constantly attacked the media – more than twice a day by the end of his campaign, according to Reporters Without Borders (RSF). He issued specific legal threats, like jailing journalists for publishing leaks or revoking broadcast licenses for TV stations that covered him critically. He fantasized out loud about the press being shot at. And he closely aligned himself with Musk.
Musk is the loudest member of a clique of tech moguls who are deeply skeptical of the value of journalism, and he is especially hostile to any form of guardrails against misinformation. His two- year tenure at X, formerly Twitter , has been emblematic of social media's descent into chaos.
Among his first moves, he dismantled Twitter's trust and safety infrastructure, laying off the vast majority of the staff responsible for things like taking down violent threats and hate speech. In their place, he welcomed neo-Nazis . Today, X is a shell of what Twitter was, with fewer users and less value, but a lot more disinformation and propaganda.
That his bid for Twitter was meant to champion free speech is the most ironic element of the Muskification of social media. Under his leadership, conservative content has been much more likely to go viral, while accounts associated with Democrats have been arbitrarily suspended . Journalists have found themselves kicked off for reporting on the Trump campaign or Musk himself .
Meta has quietly followed Musk's lead, eschewing content moderation that curbs the spread of misinformation and stepping away from the news. Faced with the possibility of actually having to pay for the journalistic content that it has for years helped to devalue by sucking up all the ad revenue, the social media giant has decided it would rather not deal with journalism at all. For the past year, news content has been banned on Facebook in Canada , and Meta threatened the same punishment in California . And when Meta launched its own competitor to Twitter, it deliberately left out news content .
Trump's victory means the Muskification of the media will continue conquering new frontiers. With Trump's apparent promise to anoint the mogul with a prominent role in the White House, one shudders to think how the Muskian worldview could spread throughout the government, from the everyday minutiae of press briefings and media accreditation to larger policy questions like funding for the U.S. Agency for Global Media.
It's clear that social media sites are no longer fertile ground for doing journalism. And while Muskification won't completely kill independent journalism, the industry does risk turning into something akin to classical music—played expertly in elite concert halls for relatively small, affluent, and highly-educated audiences.
The media, for its part, should own up to its self-inflicted wounds if it's ever going to demonstrate its value to a majority of Americans. Trump's attacks on the media are so effective for two reasons. First, they're partially grounded in the truth that much of the media is elite and disconnected from the concerns of many Americans. Second, Trump is waging asymmetrical warfare. Journalists can cover the attacks against them, but they can't hit back. The only way for journalists to counter the Muskification of their industry is to give the American public a better product.
Trust in the media has reached a nadir in recent years, but the research is clear that local journalism remains the most trusted and reliable source of information for most Americans. Unfortunately, media owners have decimated local newsrooms, weakening the product at a time when it's so sorely needed. Trust in the media overall will only be won back at the local level, through reporting that connects newsrooms and their communities, as well as communities to one another. Only then can the Fourth Estate retake its role in American democracy.
Clayton Weimers is the executive director of RSF USA, the North American branch of Reporters Without Borders (RSF). He oversees an office which monitors press freedom across English-speaking North America and advances RSF's global priorities to advocate for journalist safety and everyone's right to information.
The views expressed in this are the writer's own.
