CNN’s Don Lemon Rips Musk’s Thursday Night Massacre Twitter Purge As Trump-Style Attention Grab
CNN anchor Don Lemon ripped Elon Musk’s Thursday Night Massacre as a Trump-like attention grab, and challenged whether his colleagues should be playing into it.
On Thursday night, Musk began issuing permanent suspensions for a group of journalists who have been critical of his tenure as Twitter CEO, including CNN’s Donie O’Sullivan. The move resulted in a blistering backlash on Twitter, and was followed by a late-night attempt by Musk to clean things up in a Twitter Spaces interview.
Musk claimed the accounts were suspended for “doxxing” because the journalists in question shared information about the @ElonJet account he suspended after promising he never would do that. He abruptly ended the interview when he was challenged by one of the banned journalists, who pointed out that what he described was not, in fact, “doxxing.”
On Friday morning’s edition of CNN This Morning, CNN media reporters Oliver Darcy and Sara Fischer went into detail about Musk’s claims, which Lemon characterized as “There is no plan and thin skin is basically what it is, and just making you-know-what up as he goes.”
When Darcy laid out the potential effect on journalism, Lemon asked why they were even talking about something that could blow over once Musk found some other way to grab attention:
OLIVER DARCY: I think this is going to have a major chilling effect actually on Twitter, because now there are no rules. It’s clear there are no rules. If you irritate Elon Musk, you can get banned from the platform.
DON LEMON: But Oliver, we’re talking about it. You’re ta– we’re talking about. Is this what he wants, that we are talking about it, it doesn’t matter. And then all of a sudden don’t and everybody’s going to be reinstated. And it’s a whole Trump thing where you own the news cycle for the next 24 hours and then you do something else that is hyperbolic and outrageous, and then you own the news cycle. Why are we doing it?
OLIVER DARCY: I think it’s what’s important. It’s one of these cases where it’s difficult, right? You don’t want to give someone attention if they’re just looking for attention. But I think it’s also important to talk about what’s happening on this platform, because it is such a crucial information platform. This is how a lot of the world communicates. I mean, world leaders are on this platform, right?
Watch above via CNN This Morning.
