The NYT — ever a bundle of [fill in the blank] — has been avoiding the "Twitter Files" but is delving into The Mind of Musk in "Critics Say Musk Has Revealed Himself as a Conservative. It’s Not So Simple. Elon Musk has tweeted about political topics regularly since taking over Twitter, often belittling some liberal causes. But what he stands for remains largely unclear" by Jeremy W. Peters.
In a 24-hour period late this week, he tweeted more than 40 times, often with little rhyme or reason....
It’s true Mr. Musk certainly sounds a lot like a Republican — and, sometimes, a lot like Mr. Trump — with his missives on Twitter against “woke” politics and Covid restrictions, his attacks on “elite” media and his efforts to draw attention to allegations that Hunter Biden profited from his father’s political clout....
But where Mr. Musk has seemed most in line with the G.O.P. of Mr. Trump is in the tenor of his political commentary, which if anything seems more spiritedly anti-left than ideologically pro-right....
This doesn't feel mysterious to me at all. It sounds almost exactly the way I feel. So my hypothesis is that he's liberal, he's spent a lot of time around liberals and lefties, and he's got endless problems with the way they've betrayed what, it seems, should be their true values.
Many of his recent tweets have had that kind of “own the libs” tone, the shorthand on the right for when conservatives think they’ve deftly, often sarcastically, swatted down a liberal. A couple of weeks ago, he posted video on Twitter of a closet full of T-shirts with the slogan “#stay woke” that he said he had found at the social media company’s headquarters....
Mr. Musk has always claimed his concerns with Twitter’s previous management were about the ability of a small group of the company’s employees whom he described as “far left” to censor content.
Ah! Way down near the end of this piece, there is Twitter Files material — so the Times seems to want to cover it but not make it too visible (which reminds me of the way old Twitter "deamplified" material it disfavored):
[O]ver the past week, he has cheered on tweets about internal communications before he took over. The communications, which were given to two writers who have posted their findings on Twitter, calling them the Twitter Files, showed how the company went about deciding what information got suppressed.
The main thing isn't the files but The Mind of Musk as it observes the publication of the files.
As for the files:
It’s been a mixed bag of revelations. Some showed how Twitter employees made it harder to see tweets from a Stanford University professor who warned about how Covid lockdowns could harm children — a view many public health experts have come around to accept well after the fact.
That's massively important! And yet the NYT doesn't even tell us the name of the Stanford professor. It's Jay Bhattacharya. His story ought to be isolated, elaborated, and made front-page news!
Other documents show how more conventional, conspiracy-theory-embracing conservatives were shut down, like Dan Bongino, the radio host who was one of the biggest amplifiers of lies about the 2020 election.
And that's it for coverage of the Twitter Files. It's back to The Mind of Musk:
Mr. Musk has not professed to have any profound attachment to Republican policies, though, which is consistent with his posture before taking over Twitter.... In an interview with The New York Times in 2020, he described his politics as “middle-of-the-road.” “I’m socially very liberal. And then economically right of center, maybe, or center. I don’t know. I’m obviously not a communist.”...
He sounds like any intelligent American who isn't drawn to party politics. We may even be the majority! If only the New York Times could stop catering to the Democratic Party and write for us.
Often, it seems, his posts are motivated by personal pique, not political philosophy....
Great! An actual human being. Some people love them.
