By Ranjona Banerji
Does distance lend perspective or does it just plunge you into a welcome silence? As far as the media goes, distance definitely lends me no enchantment.
Frankly, one week into my annual holiday and I have not read a newspaper, not watched TV and not listened to the radio. I have not spent that much time online either. Whatever shows up on my social media when I have wifi is all I have to be satisfied with. Time differences mean that I am not awake when India does a lot of its humphing and outraging.
It has been an interesting week nonetheless though. Not least being billionaire Elon Musk and how his Twitter takeover has cost him. And I don’t mean just the $ 44 billion it cost him. By choosing to run Twitter himself, the, umm, maverick? spoilt? car-maker and outer- space-taker billionaire has had to back and forth over his ideas of speech, freedom, the general public and so on.
This comment in The Economist explains part of how Musk chomped far more than he could chew with Twitter.
https://www.economist.com/leaders/2022/12/19/elon-musks-44bn-education-on-free-speech?utm_content=article-link-2&etear=nl_today_2&utm_campaign=a.the-economist-today&utm_medium=email.internal-newsletter.np&utm_source=salesforce-marketing-cloud&utm_term=12/19/2022&utm_id=1425777
It’s been a quick back and forth from Musk, once a self-declared “absolutist” on free speech. He has learnt that he makes exceptions when his children are targets. That laws cannot be broken even by him. That advertisers run to where customers are and away from places customers are unhappy about.
And then there was this: Musk banning certain tech journalists from Twitter and then letting them back in.
https://www.comicsands.com/wikipedia-throws-shade-elon-musk-2658984323.html?utm_term=Autofeed&utm_medium=Social&utm_source=Twitter#Echobox=1671487867
If all this wasn’t bad enough, Musk’s main business has suffered too:
https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/tesla-stock-elon-musk-worst-sell-off-public-ev-twitter-2022-12
And journalists speculate about what he should do if he wants to run Twitter.
https://edition.cnn.com/2022/12/19/tech/twitter-alternate-ceo/index.html?utm_term=link&utm_content=2022-12-19T23%3A00%3A06&utm_source=twCNN&utm_medium=social
What has become clear though, if you really didn’t know this, money cannot buy you sense or even cross-field expertise. Evidently Musk believed in the veracity of his own fan mail.
The media in the rest of the world’s democracies has few compunctions in taking on the mighty, no matter how rich and famous. And that includes Musk. And although many Twitter users have lined up options, there is a certain ease of use in the way Twitter is set up which makes it difficult to switch. Especially if you are a journalist and interested in news from all over the world.
And that is why there is so much interest in the future of Twitter.
https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2022-12-19/is-this-my-last-column-about-elon-musk-twitter-boss
Musk bought something he didn’t understand because he was rich enough to, sort of, has an extremely large ego and a massive sense of self-importance. Also. he has clearly not been told for many years that he can be wrong. Twitter is where he has got his comeuppance because it is a public meeting place for information and ideas. But it is not the kind of manipulative space which its competitors have created. If Musk wanted to be the next Zuckerberg, he should have just bought Facebook. Although there is no guarantee that Musk would do an even halfway decent job as the Meta chief either.
Am I trying to suggest that there’s a lesson here for the Indian media? That a self-declared world expert can easily come a cropper for wasting money, making promises he can’t keep, creating chaos and pain and general incompetence? Do they know anyone else like this?
O no!
I didn’t really write that! Promise!
Ranjona Banerji is a senior journalist and commentator. She writes on MxMIndia on Tuesdays and Fridays. Her views here are personal