WATCH: Reporter Screeches At Elon Musk For Buying X, Ruining ‘Journalism’ In Wild Rant

A seasoned Washington D.C. journalist went on a verbal rampage last week, attacking Elon Musk for purchasing X and “ruining” journalistic integrity by returning unfettered free speech to the platform that famously booted President-elect Donald Trump after J6.

Jim VandeHei, the CEO of Axios and previous founder of Politico, delivered a screed for the ages against Musk, a top ally to Trump who has touted his ownership of the social media platform as a victory for consumers over the carefully curated Fourth Estate. The Daily Caller reported that VandeHei was in Washington, D.C. last Thursday where he received a journalism award from the National Press Club and used his time at the podium to rip Musk’s declaration to X users that “you are the media now.”

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“My message to Elon Musk is bulls***. You’re not the media!” he yelled into the crowd of scribblers. “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’… 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?”

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The Axios executive encouraged his colleagues to pat themselves on the back for being bulwarks against Trump’s looming administration. “Being a reporter is hard. Really hard. You have to care. You have to do the hard work. You have to get 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,” VandeHei said.

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A clip of VandeHei’s remarks was carried on “Morning Joe” where host Joe Scarborough agreed that his bashing of Musk “needed to be said” to combat “all of the garbage flying around on social media,” including “lying about what reporters do.” Left unmentioned was Scarborough’s recent knee-bending meeting with Trump at Mar-a-Lago where he and fellow MSNBC host Mika Brzezinski agreed to “restart communications” with the president-elect after popping off on him for years. Mocking Musk, he went on, “Oh! You get your news from a website run by Chinese conspiracy theorists in a Chinese religious cult? That’s where you get your – no! Social media, people lying every day, every hour, every minute about the news. What you do matters!”

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Since purchasing Twitter and rebranding it ‘X,’ Musk has ruffled feathers in the news industry to no end. He has slapped NPR’s account with a “state-sponsored” designation and most recently prompted the Guardian to shutter its longtime account. MSNBC host Joy Reid finally called it quits on the platform, citing “abuse” in comments as being among her reasons for leaving.

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