CNN host Don Lemon asked his guest Ben Smith of Semafor Monday whether reporters should treat Tesla CEO Elon Musk like they treated former President Donald Trump, citing Musk’s recent purchase of Twitter and his various policy changes that have drawn criticism from the media.
“[T]here is a huge place for Twitter. I think that he should be taking it more seriously. I think these polls and the antics is just to — it’s right out of the Trump playbook, which is what I feel. And that he is manipulating the media in order to get attention,” Lemon said to Ben Smith of Semafor. “So can you put this into perspective. Should journalists pull out their Trump playbook in order to deal with what Elon Musk is doing at Twitter? Is it a page out of the same book?”
“I think that’s a really good observation. And there’s one particular thing Trump would do, he would violate some long-standing norm in order to largely get attention and drive, you know, the keepers of the norms, including journalists totally nuts and get a ton of attention,” Smith responded. “And then sort of walk it back. And I think one difference, Kaitlan, you covered this with Trump’s first term in particular is that Trump actually didn’t know how to be an executive yet and he would say he was going to do something, cause massive outrage and then not do it.”
“One thing about Musk, he knows how to run a company, in a technical sense, knows where the buttons and levers are,” Smith continued. “So when he’s made an outrageous decision, he’s been able to implement it very fast and you’ve seen it ripple through the functions and it was not true of the west wing in 2017.”
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So what would that look like?
Well, CNN spent all of its resources trying to change the public’s option about Trump including false reporting and reporting on unverified information—Like the Steele Dossier.
