Irony died multiple deaths on Thursday’s edition of Amanpour and Company on PBS. First, host Christiane Amanpour and Columbia Journalism School Dean Jelani Cobb lamented that social media companies are moving away from fact-checking, which, they said, will make it harder to hold the government accountable, despite their own historical difficulties with the truth. Second, they worried that Trump’s relationship with people like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg will lead to the creation of a “government line” on social media that must be toed.
Amanpour began, “President Biden's outgoing speech made also reference to an oligarchy, and he was also talking about the heads of the big streaming platforms, the big social media platforms which have, like Elon Musk, got major governmental, you know, economic contracts and things like that who have – who've moved away from fact-checking, Meta moved away from fact-checking. They were all sat in pretty much the front row behind the presidential families at the inauguration.”
She further worried, “What does that mean when the oligarchs are not Rubber Barons like in Russia or in the early days of the United States, but they are media titans?”
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