So, apartheid prince Elon Musk did a sit down with dissolute real estate heir turned politician Donald Trump, and all the major media covered it as if it was a big story.
Why?
Since when is a politician having a public chat with one of his biggest financial backers news?
Let's be clear about the transactional context: to assuage his fragile ego, Musk overpaid by tens of billions to acquire a social media platform, then so drove it into the ground that its value plummeted, and he's now moving its headquarters from San Francisco to Texas while actually suing the advertisers who abandoned the toxicity he created in a desperate attempt to force them to come back and give him money. So much for that whole free speech thing. But he obviously thought a deal to give Trump free publicity and free advertising would bolster traffic by bringing back Trump cultists. But the joke will be on Musk, because Trump now has his own financially imploding social media platform, and if he were to resume shit-posting on Musk's, it would crash what little traffic Trump's gets.
But the generously labeled news media decided to play along. They know that Musk is donating to and raising money for Trump's campaign, and they knew Musk would serve Trump puffball questions, let him ramble as he pleased, that he wouldn't press Trump or ask any substantive follow-up questions, and that he would allow Trump merely to regurgitate sections of Trump's boilerplate, riddled with mendacity, stump speech— as much as Trump was able to remember, anyway.
In other words, the media knew Musk would do exactly what they do. They knew that Musk, who openly supports Trump, would be as cautious and obsequious as they themselves were at Trump's recent ostensible press conference, or at Trump's supposed debate with Joe Biden, during which Trump actually was in a debate with reality. But today's media figures aren't journalists, they merely cosplay as journalists on TV.
How in any way did last night's clumsily executed, stage managed infomercial constitute a story? If Kamala Harris sat down with one of her wealthy backers, would the New York Times and the Washington Post have teams live blogging it? Would it be an above the fold story? Yes, some of the better media outlets recounted that Trump did little more than repeat his usual talking points, but most barely if at all touched on Trump's slurred speech, his odd lisp, and the off-kilter drifts into vague incoherence that have come to characterize pretty much every Trump public appearance.
In his interviews with members of the media, Joe Biden occasionally rambled and drifted, but he mostly spoke substantively with a depth of understanding about policy that was over the heads of most of those members of the media. Trump, on the other hand, on his best days wasn't capable of substantively discussing policy with the depth of a moderately intelligent Middle School student. But many in the media can't tell the difference. And most of those that can apparently don't care. Biden was the one whose cognitive abilities were questioned, in what for weeks was the biggest media narrative about the election. Trump was mostly given a pass. Even with Biden out of the race, Trump is still mostly given a pass. But it's the deference that is most disgraceful.
The media are growing increasingly restless because Harris isn't giving them the deference they think they deserve. They want her to give an interview or hold a press conference. Because she knows how the game is played, you can be certain that she soon will, and that the interviewers will press her in ways they wouldn't dare press Trump. Of course, she will handle it perfectly well, because she is extremely intelligent and they're extremely not. But they will relish their opportunity to attempt to score points and clicks, their slavering efforts once again exposing their petty and dangerous double standards. Because when they claim that Trump has held a press conference and Harris hasn't, they give themselves credit for which they don't deserve. They didn't give Trump a press conference, they gave him exactly what Musk gave him: deference. Which they reported as if it was news.
When the histories of this era are written, the media's failures will figure prominently. In infamy.
