Liberal reporters at the New York Times are accused of targeting billionaire Elon Musk with a hit piece because they are upset about his decision to purchase Twitter for $44 billion.
The article, which is titled “Elon Musk Left a South Africa That Was Rife With Misinformation and White Privilege,” argues that Musk was “detached from apartheid’s atrocities” in South Africa and grew up “surrounded by anti-Black propaganda.”
Without presenting strong evidence, the left-wing outlet suggest he’s been greatly influenced by misinformation and white privilege since a child. The writers claim that “growing up as a white person under the racist apartheid system in South Africa may have shaped him.”
Musk’s mother, Maye, and many others have slammed the NYTimes for publishing the piece.
Now it appears the NYTimes is quietly editing the piece as it failed to provide key facts.
Tom Gara, who previously wrote for the Wall Street Journal and BuzzFeed before moving to Meta/Facebook, saw there was some stealth editing going on.
Despite changing the story, the authors did not publish a “correction notice” at the top of the article, which is a standard practice in the industry.
Some editing going on this afternoon https://t.co/3kQSgPW0Y5 pic.twitter.com/SGFQLNJIO9
— Tom Gara (@tomgara) May 5, 2022
In the final paragraph, it now reads, “Classmates at two high schools he attended described him as a loner with no close friends. None offered recollections of things he said or did that revealed his views on the politics of the time. But Black schoolmates recall that he spent time with Black friends.” We emphasize this last sentence in bold because it was added later.
One of the authors, John Eligon, snapped back at critics over their failure to publish a correction notice.
“For someone who is always critiquing journalism you sure don’t know what a correction is,” Eligon wrote in response to backlash.
This wasn’t the only edit. The NYTimes also claimed that Musk grew up “in a South Africa that saw the dangers of unchecked speech.” It’s widely understood that South Africa did not allow for unchecked speech. In fact, Musk’s mother explain that anyone who publicly opposed apartheid would land a person in jail at the time.
2/ There’s certainly some valuable reporting in this article but it just comes across as such a clear example of the reporters deciding beforehand ELON MUSK BAD and then building their article around that conclusion.https://t.co/Y7Tg7Sae0P
— Jesse Singal (@jessesingal) May 5, 2022
More on these edits via Western Journal:
“So you think the article paints Elon as bad? Or is this a clear example of you deciding beforehand that it would paint him as bad but then reading it and realizing that maybe that’s not what it does, but for your Twitter rep you can’t come out and say that?” Eligon responded.
“No, I read the whole article before commenting on your tweet and I found the framing very strange,” Singal responded. “The entire top of the piece is designed to call his politics/upbringing into question but there’s fundamentally no there there.”
Then, Singal pointed out the stealth-edit.
This was almost an hour ago. Stealth editing in the paper of record is REALLY bad for journalism. Clearly you or your coauthor or editor(s) thought something was wrong with the initial phrasing — you should really add an explanation.https://t.co/k3R86Yqpju
— Jesse Singal (@jessesingal) May 5, 2022
For someone who is always critiquing journalism you sure don’t know what a correction is.
— John Eligon (@jeligon) May 5, 2022
The correction only includes “Due to an editing error, a photo caption with an earlier version of this story misspelled the name of the son of Stanley Netshituka, the first Black student at Pretoria Boys High School. The son’s name is Masase, not Masas.”
— Will Tjernlund (@WTjern) May 5, 2022
— Vineet (@vineetee) May 5, 2022
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