Don Lemon Hits Musk for Not Releasing More Twitter Files: ‘That’s Not in the Spirit of Free Speech’
CNN anchor Don Lemon said Elon Musk’s decision not to make more internal Twitter documents available to corporate media reporters is “not in the spirit of free speech.”
The statement came during a CNN This Morning panel discussion about multiple drops of the so-called “Twitter Files” by independent journalists Matt Taibbi and Bari Weiss. Both have posted Twitter threads that purport to show systemic discrimination of certain viewpoints on the platform.
They were given access to company data by Musk, who has said he wants to “restore” free speech to social media. Taibbi and Weiss, through their reporting, have painted Twitter as a place of anti-conservative censorship before Musk’s ownership.
Lemon, Poppy Harlow, Kaitlan Collins, Oliver Darcy, and Donie O’Sullivan discussed the reporting during a segment in which the latter two expressed a desire for access to what Taibbi and Weiss have been sharing.
Harlow first asked Darcy to comment on the suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story in October 2020.
Darcy commented former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey admitted suppressing the story was a “mistake.” He added the information drops thus far have not yielded a smoking gun to prove Musk’s hyping the files as showing Twitter’s former management colluded with outside sources to influence the discourse on the platform.
“I think that’s very important to point out here,” he said. O’Sullivan then said reporting from Taibbi and Weiss should not be dismissed.
Darcy responded he and O’Sullivan “would have loved to have received a cache of files.”
“Elon Musk is effectively serving as a gatekeeper for this information,” he complained. “He is not giving it to newsrooms, he is giving it to hand-picked journalists who are then agreeing to [the condtion] of tweeting out the files instead of posting them in news stories.”
Lemon responded, “That’s not in the spirit of free speech.”
Watch above, via CNN.
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