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Musk’s Nazi Salute Tested Legacy Media. They Failed

The beleaguered watchdogs denied reality and offered clumsy excuses, explanations and evasions.

Enda Brophy 22 Jan 2025The Tyee

Enda Brophy is an associate professor in the school of communication at Simon Fraser University. He is a member of Contract Worker Justice @SFU. Find him on Bluesky at @enda-b.bsky.social.

You’ve got to feel for our legacy media organizations in North America.

Tech platforms have taken most of their advertising, draining them of their lifeblood. Their audience has steadily died off as younger generations see newspapers and television channels as quaint relics of another era, like inkwells and phone booths.

Beset from every side and looking down the barrel of a painful and embarrassing slide into irrelevance, the news organizations that were dominant for most of the last century are in crisis.

The problems aren’t simply generational, either. Within the rise across the world of what Alberto Toscano calls late fascism, neoliberal media institutions like the Globe and Mail and the New York Times seem to be profoundly confused as to how they should proceed.

On the one hand, right-wing audiences turned their backs on legacy media companies long ago, mastering platforms like 4Chan, Discord and other alternatives developed in the early 21st century. The idea of the liberal-democratic media serving as a public sphere/marketplace of ideas is a quaint liberal-democratic fiction at this point, since Trump’s election victories have largely been built in right-wing echo chambers.

Even worse, neo-fascist movements and their populist-nationalist leaders like Donald Trump, Viktor Orban and others have stolen a page out of the counter-globalization movements of the late 1990s and 2000s and made attacking mainstream media organizations and building their own a key part of their political movements.

So in a conjuncture like this, when the world’s richest man who donated millions to an incoming authoritarian U.S. president’s campaign gives a speech on inauguration day and makes a Nazi salute not once, but twice, you can see why these media organizations might be a little confuzzled (drawing on my kids’ vocabulary here) and lost about how to respond.

It must have been a mistake, right? A misinterpretation! There must be an explanation for such a repulsive social gesture…. Maybe it’s because he’s on the spectrum! Because he’s so immune to social cues he’s unaware of the long history of this particular gesture. That must be it!

In early coverage of Musk’s Nazi salute, multiple news organizations seemed to go out of their way to ignore the story completely. As the outrage grew, liberal media outlets increasingly presented the event as one that was open to interpretation rather than accepting what we all saw with our own eyes.

Because legacy media no longer has an easy script to follow in its description of political events. When Bill Clinton came into office on the heels of George Bush, their politics certainly differed but they always remained within that comfortable binary of “centre-left” and “centre-right.” Which is to say that they both supported privatization, contracting out, destroying unions, rapacious global trade agreements and deepening social inequality, but they differed over exactly how far they would proceed with each.

Established newspapers like the Washington Post could confidently endorse one presidential candidate over the other, because in the end they really weren’t all that dissimilar.

That is not the situation today. The incoming U.S. administration is a qualitatively different kind of beast. These guys are acting like Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel The Handmaid’s Tale is an aspirational text, and we all know what happens to liberal media outlets in that story, or in the rise of any fascist regime.

What’s worse, the tech oligarchs who stole all the advertising and have built empires on our data are sucking it up and falling in line with the new rulers.

And so the Nazi salute disappears within an “exuberant speech” in the Washington Post, or the moment is written off as a “hand gesture” in the New York Times, the Globe and Mail, Reuters and many others. A controversial moment that is open to interpretation. Musk’s act becomes something which could be seen as the sign of a white supremacist movement founded on technological superiority and eugenics, but it also could just have been (according to the Jewish Anti-Defamation League’s surreal downplaying of the event) an “awkward gesture” which led to a massive overreaction in polarized times.

There are many things to talk about as we process day one (to use Shakespeare) of hell being empty and all the devils being here, but Musk’s Nazi salute is one of the most important events, and for a crucial reason.

How each legacy media organization responds to events like this will tell us how accommodating they will be to the rise of fascism in the United States. It is a litmus test of adaptation to authoritarianism on the part of institutions we were always told were the bastions of democratic rule. As Marisa Kabas notes, we need media organizations to just call things what they are.

Keep your eye on the mainstream media, people. Looks like they may be the next to buckle.  [Tyee]

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