Media outlets slam Musk after his plans to launch site to rate credibility of journalists

At the age of 25, Elon Musk along with his younger brother Kimbal founded Zip2, a company which provided online city guide software to newspapers. Call it the Google Maps of the late 90s. Musk sold the company to Compaq Computer in 1999, four years after it was founded for $307 million. Musk personally netted $22 million from the acquisition.

Elon Musk went on a Twitter rant spanning over 60 tweets and three days—Wednesday to Friday—attacking the media and its credibility. He also announced the launch of a ‘media credibility rating site’ Pravda.

He said the site would be bot-proof and will have enough checks and balances to make the ratings accountable. He also laid out the plan how he would do it. Apparently, one of Musk's agents has already incorporated Pravda Corp in California back in October.

“Going to create a site where the public can rate the core truth of any article & track the credibility score over time of each journalist, editor & publication. Thinking of calling it Pravda,” Musk said in a tweet.

Pravda, in Russian, means Truth. A communist newspaper also ran with the same name for eight decades till the dissolution of the USSR in 1991.

Musk’s tirade started with a tweet linking an Electrek.co article reporting Baird’s auto analyst’s prediction that Tesla stocks could rally as the negative headlines about the company has reached a peak and are “increasingly immaterial”.

Musk said media has a “holier-than-thou” attitude “who lay claim to the truth, but publish only enough to sugarcoat the lie, is why the public no longer respects them.”

Problem is journos are under constant pressure to get max clicks & earn advertising dollars or get fired. Tricky situation, as Tesla doesn’t advertise, but fossil fuel companies & gas/diesel car companies are among world’s biggest advertisers.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 23, 2018

He also put up a poll asking if he should create such a site. 88 percent of over 681,000 people who voted said, “Yes, this would be good.” The rest voted for “No, media are awesome.”

Media organisations, reporters and editors took his accusations in their stride and came out united to defend Musk’s charge.

The New York Times suggested Musk’s tirade is a response to a series of unfavourable media reports which have highlighted problems with Tesla Motors, the company he heads. The reportage includes delays in Tesla Model 3 productions, fatal accidents involving Tesla’s autonomous cars, accidents at Tesla factory injuring workers and financial crunch the company is facing.

The Atlantic said he may have made his career out of creating companies to fill gaps he perceives in various industries and now he eyes news business but “if only he knew the first thing about journalism”.

The Verge’s senior transportation reporter, Andrew Hawkins said Musk was slowly transforming into “a media-baiting Trump figure screaming irrationally about fake news.” Pulitzer Prize-winning Interactive editor at The Post and Courier, J Amory Parker tweeted, “Blaming the messenger is the hot new thing everyone's doing.”

Sharon Weinberger, executive editor at Foreign Policy said, “I was once invited to visit SpaceX's facility on Kwajalein. Following interviews, I was told @elonmusk had to review all articles prior to publication. I explained journalism doesn't work that way. His current tweets come as no surprise.”

Narrating a similar incident, a journalist with the Wall Street Journal said, “At initial press tour of giga factory, Tesla wanted journalists to sign NDAs. On a press tour. With journalists. whose job is precisely to disclose stuff. They eventually walked it back but it’s indicative of Musk’s misunderstanding of press & desire to control his image. (Sic)”

Musk, interestingly, replied to as many tweets by media persons defending his stance and at times taunting them. In one of the tweets, he termed journalists for the Center for Investigative Reporting “rich kids in Berkeley who took their political science prof too seriously”.

The nonprofit journalistic organisation in its April report had catalogued a number of serious injuries experienced by Tesla factory workers.