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CNBC was disgraced to publish an interview with actors who pretended that Elon Musk fired them from Twitter. In an effort to show that Musk can only bring chaos, the journalists completely ignored their duties and published fake information in an article written by at least three journalists.

The state of journalism today is deplorable, as shown by the CNBC story of a spate of Twitter layoffs built on a hoax. The publication frequently publishes negative information about Musk and Tesla, and often avoids stories with positive news about them. CNBC’s hot new story, published today, is no exception.

After Musk completed his purchase of Twitter the media expected a wave of layoffs. With these thoughts in mind, a team of CNBC reporters went to Twitter HQ in San Francisco to “catch” the laid-off employees leaving the building. In an effort to get what they expected, journalists neglected all their obligations to readers and collected and published only the material that corresponded to their mood.

While CNBC journalists “hunted down” the victims of the supposedly harsh Musk, two guys who live near the headquarters of Twitter decided to walk around with boxes of props to troll the scandal-hungry media workers. Two guys said they were fired platform developers, with one picking up Michelle Obama's 2018 book Becoming for dramatic effect. The guys introduced themselves as “Rahul Ligma” and “Daniel Johnson.”

To understand the whole comedy of the situation, you need to immerse yourself in bit of the history. Ligma is a made-up disease and internet hoax claimed to have killed popular Fortnite video game streamer Ninja. When people not in on the joke ask “What is ligma?” pranksters reply with the crass pun “Ligma (lick my) b*lls” or another such slang term, like nuts. Ligma spread as a joke in May 2018, the same year that Michelle Obama's Becoming was published.

Throughout the day, a fake story entitled "Elon Musk's first day owning Twitter leads to havoc and a possible hoax about layoffs" circulated. Within hours, CNBC added an editor's note stating that “several reports emerged suggesting it was a hoax.” They also wrote that CNBC could not confirm the identities of the individuals.

This story once again points to the level of journalism, which, unfortunately, is now widely seen in mainstream media. Deirdre Bosa, Yasmin Khorram, and Lauren Feiner, credited as the authors of the article written with contributions from Lora Kolodny, made no effort to identify the sources of the information before releasing the article to a general audience. Obviously, their main goal was to write a clickable, hot story, especially one that contained negative information about Musk. Given their neglect of work duties, I see no real reason why these journalists would not do this in the future, once again deceiving readers and manipulating their opinions.

© 2022, Eva Fox | Tesmanian. All rights reserved.

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Article edited by @SmokeyShorts; follow him on Twitter

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