‘Bullsh*t!’ Axios’ Jim VandeHei Absolutely Loses It Over Elon Musk’s ‘Nonsense’ Claim That the Media Has Been Replaced
Jim VandeHei, the CEO and co-founder of Axios, absolutely lost it on Elon Musk over his claim that the media has been replaced by “citizen journalists,” calling it “bullshit” in an impassioned speech at the National Press Club late last week.
“I hate this damn debate about like, ‘Oh, we don’t need the media.’ Like, it is not true! Think about what makes this -, I love this country, I’m a beneficiary of this country. Like some [expletive] from Wisconsin, who can come and start two companies, be up here, win an award, sit next to Mikey, I’m a beneficiary of it,” began VandeHei. “But there’s something about the country, there’s something about it, right? There’s something about freedom, capitalism, the animal spirits of democracy. But at the core of that is maybe transparency, maybe a free press, maybe the ability to do your job without worrying to go to jail. Maybe the ability to sit in a war zone and tell people what’s actually happening so they’re not just looking at distortion, matters. It matters profoundly. It’s why-, it’s not like we just love getting up at 3 or 4 in the morning doing this every single day. Like we do it because we love it. We do it because it matters. The work that we do matters.”
He continued:
Everything we do is under fire. Elon Musk sits on Twitter every day or X today saying like, “We are the media. You are the media.” My message to Elon Musk is: Bullshit! You’re not the media, you having a blue checkmark, a Twitter handle ,and 300 words of cleverness doesn’t make you a reporter anymore than me looking at your head, and seeing that you have a brain and telling you have an awesome set of tools makes me a damn neurosurgeon, right?
Like what we do, what journalists do, what you did in Mississippi, what Al-Jazeera does in the Middle East. You don’t proclaim yourself to be a reporter. Like this nonsense, like being a reporter is hard. Really hard. You have to care. You have to do the hard work. You have to get up every single day and say, “I want to get to the closest approximation of the truth without any fear, without any favoritism.” You don’t do that by popping off on Twitter. You don’t do that by having an opinion. You do it by doing the hard work.
For his efforts, VandeHei earned a round of applause from MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough and the rest of Monday’s Morning Joe crew.
Musk has in recent days touted “citizen journalism” and told his followers on X that “You are the media now.”
He responded to VandeHei on X by declaring “Yeah, whatever lmao. You are the media now. And legacy media know it.”
Watch above via MSNBC.
