Elon Musk Squares Up to the News Media

The news wars between platforms and legacy media are heating up

This is an ostrich, all will be revealed in the article. Source: Photo by Daniel Bernard on Unsplash

This week, Elon Musk hit out at the news media… again. Musk used his Twitter/X platform to accuse the “legacy news media” of relentlessly lying and claiming that Twitter/X was the place to refute false reporting.

Source: Twitter/X

This is just one part of the ongoing power battle between Musk and legacy media. Like him or loathe him, Musk understands that news media is in the midst of a paradigm shift and is doing his utmost to slay the legacy news media. Will he succeed? Going by his shambolic takeover of Twitter/X, probably not.

But one thing is for sure, legacy media will have to adapt or it will crumble. It already is crumbling, just look at some of the data from the Reuters Digital News Report 2024:

• News avoidance — 39% say they now actively avoid the news — up 3 percentage points on last year’s average.
• Fragmentation — six networks now reach at least 10% of respondents, compared with just two a decade ago.
• Changing consumption — News video is now primarily consumed on online platforms (72%)…