Elon Musk’s release of the "Twitter Files," showing behind the scenes efforts to suppress the New York Post’s bombshell Hunter Biden laptop story didn’t just break news, it was also an attempt to break the legacy media’s grip on news itself.
Instead of appearing on 60 minutes, as most CEO’s would, or giving the internal materials to the New York Times or Washington Post, Musk handed the story to independent journalists Matt Taiibi and Bari Weiss and then broke the story on his own platform. Not only that, he teased the release to create a kind of appointment viewing for the document dump.
The billionaire tycoon behind Tesla and SpaceX has not been shy about his desire to make his latest toy, Twitter, a platform on which a new kind of journalism can emerge and thrive. He has spoken up recently about the value of citizen journalism and criticized the "media elite," calling their control of the news an "oligopoly on information".
Taiibi’s pre-announced tweet thread on December 2nd utterly circumvented the mainstream media, depriving it of its usual role of curating how revelations such as the efforts to suppress the laptop story are presented to the public. This is a potential sea change in how journalism in America operates, and it's not just Musk.
JIM BAKER, OUSTED TWITTER LAWYER AND EX-FBI OFFICIAL, WAS A CNN ANALYST IN BETWEEN JOBS
As an aide to Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, Chistina Pushaw made waves this summer by denying legacy media outlets credentials to cover the Republican Party of Florida’s Sunshine Summit. She would later say of the mainstream press, "What do we do? We cut them off. Treat them like activists because that’s what they are."
Both Musk and Pushaw are taking dead aim at one of the last major advantages that traditional news outlets have over independent media in the digital age, which is access. For as long as there has been news media, large powerful outlets have used their huge audiences to convince insiders, be they in politics, big tech, or anywhere else, to give them the big stories first. That access is now starting to be in question.
If Pushaw and others are successful in convincing conservatives to turn off the spigot of stories to the establishment press and instead use independent media outlets, Twitter and Musk could be huge beneficiaries. After all, the Blue Bird really is where indie news sites live and breathe.
In this new journalistic ecosystem the must-see news bombshell exclusively broken on Twitter could become a staple of American journalism. Tune in tonight for shocking revelations about this, that, or the other thing. And with Musk’s plans to allow longer and longer videos on the platform, as well as enhancing live interaction, like his own appearance this week on Twitter Spaces, the site could become almost an open source news network.
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The biggest obstacle to Musk’s plans to reinvent journalism is that still only a small percentage of Americans use Twitter at all, about six percent. And while the news dumps like the Twitter Files can bring the thoroughbred legacy outlets to water, it can’t make them drink. In fact, to the very limited extent that liberal news media has even mentioned the revelations about suppression of the laptop story, their general attitude has been that there is nothing to see here.
Just over a month into Musk’s leadership at Twitter, which came with the hefty price tag of $44 billion dollars, we can already see that his plans for the platform are sky-high, in his particular case, maybe even higher. Among other things he bought the space where the nation’s journalists mix and mingle, deciding on the contours of news coverage.
But maybe under Musk’s guidance Twitter can become more than the news industry’s office water cooler, maybe it can become a leader in the news industry itself.
