MSNBC host Joe Scarborough took a swipe at Elon Musk Wednesday for drawing attention to a five-year-old clip of co-host Mika Brzezinski that was framed misleadingly in a viral tweet.
Scarborough lambasted Musk for promoting the clip and falsely implying it showed Brzezinski warning that Musk sought to undermine faith in the media and “make up his own facts.” However, the clip is several years old and showed her discussing then-President Donald Trump.
“They take this video that was taken out of context five years ago — even the Associated Press has done a fact check on it because Elon Musk joins in, which tells you what a sewer Twitter would be if he ran it,” he said.
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Scarborough noted that Brzezinski received some backlash for her question days ago about Twitter’s ability to prevent a Musk takeover but defended her, highlighting the fact that Twitter subsequently moved to deploy a so-called poison pill strategy to make it more expensive and difficult for Musk to purchase the company.
“It’s a question, which I think is a legitimate question to ask,” Scarborough contended. “Of course, two or three hours later, there was breaking news that Twitter had put up guardrails to dilute the stock. But Willie, people just freaked out.”
Last Friday, Brzezinski asked guest Linette Lopez, a Business Insider columnist, about whether Twitter could do anything to stop Musk’s bid to take over the company.
“I think you bring up a great point, but, Linette, are there any ways to stop him if he wants to buy Twitter? Are there any guardrails around something like this? Because this could be a very dangerous precedent,” Brzezinski asked.
One day after Brzezinski asked that question on-air, Musk responded approvingly to a tweet that said, “MSNBC: Elon Musk is trying to control how people think,” and showed a clip of Brzezinski warning about someone trying to undermine faith in the media and “make up his own facts.” The clip did not make it immediately clear who she was referring to, with the accompanying tweet seeming to imply it was Musk.
“He’s trying to undermine the media, trying to make up his own facts. And it could be that while unemployment and the economy worsens, he could have undermined the messaging so much that he can actually control exactly what people think. And that is our job,” Brzezinski said in the years-old clip.
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— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 16, 2022
But Brzezinski was actually referring to former President Donald Trump, and the clip was about five years old. Musk responded to the tweet with two laughing emojis Saturday, which drew increased attention to it on Twitter. As Scarborough noted, the Associated Press ran a fact check on the tweet because of its spread.
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Last week, Musk offered to purchase Twitter for $43 billion. He had previously amassed a roughly 9% stake in the company and indicated he wanted to gain influence within the company to steer it in more of a pro-free speech direction.
