Elon Musk hasn’t exactly been a darling of the mainstream media. Musk’s electric car company, Tesla, has endured numerous attacks and overt smear campaigns over the past few years. He explains, “They’ve been writing bogus articles about Tesla (and me) for years. In the end, it is their own credibility that suffers.”
Regardless, Musk decided to express some of his views about how manipulative (and divisive) media outlets have become — sounding the alarm that things need to change.
It all started when Brett Winton, director of research at investment firm ARK Invest, tweeted about a bizarre effort to “bully, threaten, extort, and browbeat” his company into giving up on their investment in Tesla. Musk, in turn, called it a concerted “FUD” campaign — an acronym referring to the media’s amplification of Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt.
The conversation expanded further on Twitter when users began to lament the endless “doom-scrolling” that happens when trying to sort through the latest depressing news feed. In turn, Musk asked, “Why is the ‘traditional’ media such a relentless hatestream?”
A few years ago, during a Hack Club AMA, Musk showed support for “citizen journalism” as the next frontier for trustworthy content in lieu of traditional media outlets. He discussed the danger of advertising dollars corrupting the press to push out “clickbait” instead of quality journalism.
