Whereas a lot of Mr. Musk’s posts, notably these on grooming gangs, originated within the ecosystem of far-right bloggers and activists, they’re additionally tempting to mainstream politicians in quest of a cudgel to make use of towards their opponents. They usually attraction to editors and broadcasters on the lookout for a very good story.
“The British press and the broadcasters, to a level, fell throughout themselves to offer Elon Musk publicity,” mentioned David Yelland, a former editor of Rupert Murdoch’s tabloid, The Solar. “Within the print press, they did it as a result of they’re extraordinarily hostile to Keir Starmer. That is plain outdated Fleet Avenue bias.”
Claire Enders, a London-based media researcher and founding father of Enders Evaluation, likened Mr. Musk to Mr. Murdoch, the rebel media baron from Australia who upended the London newspaper trade within the Nineteen Seventies. “We simply have a brand new Murdoch,” she mentioned. “He’s American, he’s a multibillionaire, and he’s near Trump.”
Mr. Musk, nevertheless, just isn’t focused on taking on the British press a lot as discrediting it. He claims the information media was complicit in a coverup of abuses towards younger women. The reality is, British newspapers throughout the political spectrum did cowl these crimes, if not instantly, then energetically, as the size of the abuses grew to become obvious within the late 2000s and early 2010s. The Occasions of London revealed a significant investigation of the scandal, and the gradual response to it by the police, in 2011.
“It’s been on the entrance web page of each paper and led the 6 o’clock information for years,” mentioned Raheem Kassam, who coated the scandal as editor of the British outpost of the right-wing information outlet, Breitbart Information. “The thought that there’s a media blackout on this, and we wanted Elon Musk to uncover it, is nonsense.”
