Fox News Entirely Ignores Elon Musk’s Anti-Semitic Posts Because Of Course They Have

Elon Musk is receiving broad and bipartisan condemnation for nakedly amplifying an anti-Semitic trope Wednesday evening, even eliciting condemnation from the White House. But if you solely get your news from Fox News, you would have no idea because, as of writing this column, it has been mentioned exactly zero times on the cable news ratings giant.

Musk was called out Wednesday evening after he replied to an anti-Semitic post by telling its author that he had “said the actual truth.” The post in question read:

Jewish communties [sic] have been pushing the exact kind of dialectical hatred against whites that they claim to want people to stop using against them. I’m deeply disinterested in giving the tiniest shit now about Western Jewish populations coming to the disturbing realization that those hordes of minorities that support flooding their country don’t exactly like them too much. You want truth said to your face, there it is.

“This is literally the conspiracy theory espoused by the white supremacist who massacred the Pittsburgh Tree of Life synagogue. Musk approves. I have no further commentary,” said The Atlantic’s Yair Rosenberg. That was but one example of vocal and bipartisan outrage over Musk’s amplification of anti-Semitic tropes, which has led some brands to drop advertising from X.

Linda Yaccarino, CEO of X, tried to clean up the blowback of Musk’s anti-Semitic post but seemed to make matters worse when she was broadly criticized for ignoring Musk’s comment entirely, as well as pretending that the social media platform has NOT become a safe haven for hate towards Jewish people since Musk took over roughly a year ago.

None of this is terribly surprising, as Fox News news editors have long seemed to prioritize the profits that come from serving their viewers what they want to see (which they disingenuously referred to in leaked texts as “respecting the audience“) over the principled reporting of actual news.

Musk is, of course, one of the wealthiest people in the world and is becoming notorious in some circles for effectively ruining X (née Twitter) under the thin guise of free speech absolutism that has removed any effective content moderation and allowed anti-Semitic vitriol to thrive. Oh, and he posts anti-Semitic bullshit himself!

But Fox News has long seen Musk as a First Amendment hero who will defang the “Big Tech” bogeyman of which they see themselves as political victims. Acknowledging past hagiography was misguided, which may be part of the reason why they are looking the other way in this story. The other is that criticism of Musk is not what the audience — who still seems to largely adore the tech titan — don’t want to hear it.

Fox News has a long history of covering anti-Semitism. They took a principled but very aggressive political position after Rep. Ilhan Omar’s (D-MN) regrettable “all about the Benjamins” comment from yesteryear. So it’s not like Fox News looks the other way on these sorts of stories — just ones that involve their political heroes.

Not ALL Fox outlets ignored this story, though. Charles Gasparino reacted to the news in his signature style, offering the right amount of judgment and mockery of Musk’s absurd musings. Mediaite’s Michael Luciano reported Thursday night:

He then wondered if Musk, who reportedly uses ketamine, was on drugs at the time.

“What’s going on in this guy’s mind?” Gasparino asked. “Is he losing it or was he really high when he said this, when he retweeted this? Twitter, as you know, is a place filled with landmines. You can easily trip up here, though this doesn’t seem like something that’s easy to trip up. Somebody’s talking about Nazis.”

He then cited a 2019 settlement between Tesla and the Securities and Exchange Commission in which Musk is required to have his social media posts pre-cleared by an “experienced securities lawyer.” The agreement came after Musk claimed in 2018 that he was considering a go-private bid at $420 a share and dubiously claimed that he had “funding secured” for such a deal.

“The board is supposed to be monitoring his tweets,” Gasparino noted. “Where the hell are they on this thing?”

“Where the hell are they on this thing” is exactly the right sentiment, and not just about the X board monitoring Musk’s posts. Where the hell is Fox News on this thing?

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.

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