Elon Musk is a disruptor.
I guess you have to have some smarts to turn yourself into the second-richest person on the planet. Except for a series of self-inflicted wounds, he could be, and once was, the richest. And for a guy like Musk, I’ll bet that second-richest tag stings.
He’s an angry little man, that Elon, weird as all giddy-up too, but you’d think being a billionaire would soften the blows. But no, that doesn’t seem to be the way it works with most of these guys. It seems like their money serves as a multiplier for any grievance they may be carrying in their hearts.
Since his much-maligned takeover of Twitter for a very much inflated $44 billion dollars, (can you imagine?) Musk has been going about tossing one grenade after another at his new prize, driving both employees and users away in droves. But he’s a billionaire and I’m not, so who the hell am I to criticize?
Musk has taken Twitter, which had devolved into a sewer of hate speech and right-wing political propaganda, and turned it into a sewer of hate speech and right-wing propaganda, only this time even better. More hate. More propaganda.
Recently, Twitter decreed that NPR, a reaspected radio-based media outlet in the United States, be labelled publicly on Twitter as “Government-Funded Media.” That’s because it accepts roughly 1% of its operating budget from the federal government. Similar to PBS, or the Public Broadcasting System, NPR receives government assistance to operate their media, with the intention of ensuring that there is a fair-minded, balanced place where people can go and get their news. But Musk views them as a government mouthpiece, and so therefore something to be denigrated, since accuracy and honesty can be a billionaires worst friends.
So now, Musk has insisted that the official NPR account be displayed with a tag indicating that it’s a government-funded media operation, which in Musk-speak screams out “fake news,” which is a right-wing catch-all for anyone who doesn’t agree with them. It should be noted that NPR, to their credit, will no longer be represented on Twitter. They feel having that tag placed upon them impinges upon the credibility of their work. For the record, NPR is a top-rate, professional news organization, probably why assholes with billions hate them.
Never one to miss an opportunity to do or say something stupid, Canada’s Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre has released a public letter to Twitter asking that the CBC, or Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, be labelled as government-funded media.
In fairness and strictly speaking, they are. But Conservatives suspiciously consider the CBC to be the mouthpiece of the Liberals. Plus, as conservatives, they’re steadfast in their opposition to Crown corporations, of which the CBC is one. Tired, fatigued ideology that they just can’t move on from.
Poilievre took history in high school, I guess, like the rest of us. But maybe he wasn’t paying attention all that much. There are a lot of reasons why the CBC exists, and the largest among them is the idea that there would be a need to protect Canadian voices from being drowned out by the overwhelming influence of content from south of the border.
Why the Conservatives hate the CBC so much is beyond me, but they’re Conservatives, and hate is what they do. Being miserable little playground bastards is a look they seem to like.
Way to go Pierre. You’re so clever. You’d make an excellent Republican.
And he’d take that as a compliment.
NEWSMAGRENFREW 