Axios’ VandeHei: ‘My Message to Elon Musk Is, Bull***t! You’re Not the Media!’

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VANDEHEI: “I hate this damn debate about, like, oh, we don’t need the media. Like, it is not true. Think about what makes this — I love this country. I’m a beneficiary of this country. Like some bull***t from Wisconsin who can come and start two companies, be up here, win an award, sit next to Mikey, I’m a beneficiary of it. But there’s something about the country. There’s something about it, right? There’s something about freedom, capitalism, the animal spirits of democracy. But at the core of that is maybe transparency, maybe a free press, maybe the ability to do your job without worrying to go to jail. Maybe the ability to sit in a war zone and tell people what’s actually happening so they’re not just looking at distortion matters. It matters profoundly. It’s why — it’s not like we just love getting up at 3 or 4 in the morning doing this every single day. Like we do it because we love it. We do it because it matters. The work that we do matters. (...) Everything we do is under fire. Elon Musk sits on Twitter every day or X today saying like, we are the media. You are the media. My message to Elon Musk is: ‘Bulls**t. You’re not the media.’ (Applause) You having — you having a blue checkmark, a Twitter handle, and 300 words of cleverness doesn’t make you a Reporter any more than me looking at your head and seeing that you have a brain and telling you have an awesome set of tools makes me a damn neurosurgeon, right? Like what we do, what journalists do, what you did in Mississippi, what Al Jazeera does in the Middle East, you proclaim yourself to be a Reporter? Like that’s nonsense. Like being a Reporter is hard, really hard. You have to care. You have to do the hard work. You have to skid up every single day and say, ‘I want to get to the closest approximation of the truth without any fear, without any favoritism.’ You don’t do that by popping off on Twitter. You don’t do that by having an opinion. You do it by doing the hard work.”
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