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Judge allows Elon Musk’s ‘thermonuclear’ lawsuit against Media Matters to proceed
Elon Musk accuses Media Matters of manufacturing images to falsely accuse his social media platform X of putting advertisers next to Nazi content.
CALVIN FREIBURGER for LIFESITE NEWS
Last November, Musk, the Tesla owner whose purchase of Twitter and transformation of it into X has upended left-wing activists’ monopoly on social media speech, filed a lawsuit against MMFA over an article it published accusing accusing Musk of having descended “into white nationalist and antisemitic conspiracy theories,” and “placing ads for major brands like Apple, Bravo (NBCUniversal), IBM, Oracle, and Xfinity (Comcast) next to content that touts Adolf Hitler and his Nazi Party.” (ER: Which sounds about as unhinged as those suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome.)
kovop/ShutterstockMusk responded that the article’s images were “manufactured” to create a false impression and “destroy” X. He vowed to launch a “thermonuclear lawsuit against Media Matters and ALL those who colluded in this fraudulent attack on our company,” promising to hold accountable the group’s’ “board, their donors, their network of dark money, all of them.”
On August 29, Bush-appointed U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas Judge Reed O’Connor rejected MMFA’s bid to have the suit dismissed.
“Plaintiff has provided sufficient allegations to survive dismissal,” he wrote. “Plaintiff has factually alleged: the existence of contracts subject to interference; intentional acts of interference; and proximate causation […] Plaintiff plausibly alleges that Defendants proximately caused their harm. Proximate cause requires proof of both cause-in-fact and foreseeability. Defendants present a compelling alternative version of events to Plaintiff’s. However, the Court will not ‘choose among competing inferences’ at this stage […] Accordingly, Plaintiff’s Amended Complaint alleges sufficient facts to state a claim of tortious interference with contract.”
Commenting on the ruling, George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley wrote that “Musk’s lawsuit may be the most defining for our age of advocacy journalism” because it “directly challenges the ability of media outlets to create false narratives to advance a political agenda.”
“The complaint accuses Media Matters of running its manipulation to produce extremely unlikely pairings, such that one toxic match appeared for ‘only one viewer (out of more than 500 million) on all of X: Media Matters,’” Turley explained. “In other words, the organization wanted to write a hit piece connecting X to pro-Nazi material and proceeded to artificially create pairings between that material and corporate advertisements. It then ran the story as news.”
“Indeed, two defendant employees of Media Matters did not deny that they were aware of the alleged manipulation and that they were seeking to poison the well for advertisers in order to drain advertising revenues for X,” he added.
Media Matters describes its mission as “comprehensively monitoring, analyzing, and correcting conservative misinformation in the U.S. media,” but conservatives say its true mission is to demonize conservative voices and promote leftist narratives and misinformation. Leftist billionaire George Soros has supported the organization with millions in donations since its birth in 2004, though he did not go public with his support until 2010.
Media Matters founder David Brock has described the organization’s mission as “guerrilla warfare and sabotage” against Fox News but has long since branched out to other major outlets deemed out of step with the Left. It has also advocated censoring conservatives on social networks such as Facebook, to which Musk’s purchase and transformation of Twitter stands in opposition.
In 2021, Media Matters was one of multiple left-wing groups that took credit for pressuring Facebook to ban LifeSiteNews, based on false claims of “COVID-19 and vaccine disinformation.”
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