Rolled

BBC News' Elon Musk scoop was a triumph... for Musk

I’ve had a health scare recently so sorry for the break in transmission here and the shortness of this edition. Normal service will resume presently.

Previously: The war of Elon’s ego

---

Steve Jobs’ fabled ability to shape media and therefore public perceptions of himself, Apple, and its products, was known as “the reality distortion field”. It was a combination of low cunning, superficial charm, abundant charisma, bullying, bullshit, and open aggression.

The term was coined in 1981 by Bud Tribble — who is still at Apple as VP of Software Technology — when he was working on the original Macintosh project with Jobs. He said he took it from Star Trek (specifically TOS episode ‘The Menagerie’), which is ironic given his surname, Tribble, is shared by a fast-breeding furry creature that causes Kirk, Spock, and the gang a lot of trouble.

Though the ‘reality distortion field’ was an internal Apple term, as soon as hacks heard it they were addicted to using it. Even the mildest marketing tricks could be reframed as products of the RDF if Steve Jobs was involved and the myth and legends of Steve Jobs were traffic gold for tech publications and mainstream outlets alike.

Talk of the RDF, along with Apple’s brutal approach to press management, also meant most interviews with Jobs were suck-jobs or shaking fearful encounters as if conducted during an audience with a sinister secular saint. Steve Jobs was, both professionally and personally, often appalling but, in death, his halo formed almost instantly. He knew that being ‘nice’ or appealing to elite consensus was of absolutely no use to him. That made him unplayable for most hacks.

I was in the room with Jobs once. I saw him from a distance at a launch. That was it. I never got to put a question to him and if I had, I would have been utterly terrified; I was in my early twenties and worked for a gadget magazine that relied on easy and consistent access to Apple technology. Stuff had its heyday in the years just after I joined as the 2007 launch of the iPhone made smartphones a burning hot category with something new every month and endless Apple speculation driving online traffic to new heights.

The 39-year-old version of me would not be scared of Jobs. I write for myself and I could not give a shit if Apple likes me or wants to lend me a phone. I use an old model and it works fine. The new cameras are a little too keen to pick up my increasing collection of imperfections and I don’t need my smartphone to take on the role of the Roman slave whispering “Remember, you are mortal,” in the emperor’s ear every time I take a selfie.

When you have a particular beat — be it politics, sport, tech, or whatever — you need to know who the big players are and what you’d ask them if an interview opportunity suddenly dropped into your lap. If you’re on top of your brief, you will always have questions for those people. In the unlikely event that I got a 5-minute sitdown with Rupert Murdoch, I know exactly what question I would ask. Give me longer and I have the full game plan for a three-question interview: The first on morality, the second on strategy, and the third on legacy.

James Clayton unexpectedly got a scoop today — a surprise interview with Elon Musk with just a few hours notice — and… he got rolled. Musk dunked on Clayton and made him look silly. It needn’t have been that way and the BBC’s claim that the encounter produced multiple news lines is more than a little bit desperate. Clayton was wet and went into the encounter expecting there to be rules of engagement.

On Radio 4’s Media Show, Clayton said the fact that the interview would be conducted live on Twitter Spaces was sprung on him and his producer at 7.55 pm — 5 minutes before the agreed 8 pm start time — and presented as a “non-negotiable” by Musk’s lackey. Clayton says that was “embracing the absolute madness and chaos of Elon Musk” but that he covers the CEO “a lot”. That is true but it seems he hasn’t spent very long thinking about how Musk works.

Clayton approached Musk with dry cracker good faith questions and was surprised that he received ‘jokey’ responses and moments where the dynamic of interviewer and interviewee was flipped. In his Media Show interview, Clayton admits “There were times when I have engaged with him when I shouldn’t have” and Katie Razzall, the show’s presenter, tries to give him the excuse that he hadn’t “war-gamed” the interview. But that is a terrible excuse.

The North American Technology Editor for the BBC should not be unprepared for what Musk is like. Not should Clayton have been unable to reach for examples of unacceptable content when Musk asked him for them. He could have opened the app, looked at the For You tab, and found several instantly.

One section of the Media Show interview is particularly telling:

.. he’s very fun. He will say odd and interesting things. And you do reach a point when you have such a big following that pretty much anything you say or write about Elon Musk will do really well. We have this problem all the time when we’re covering tech. Every day, we could cover Elon Musk and get really good numbers on our online stories… But editorially, is it right that the tech scene covers Elon Musk and nothing else? 

Well, of course, it’s not. We have to balance whether a story really meets the bar of whether we should be covering Elon Musk. The media generally love Elon Musk, in the same way that the media loves Donald Trump; they knew that it would ‘sell newspapers’, that it would get clicks…

BBC News should not be primarily bothered about ‘clicks’. That should not be the driving force behind their desire to chase a story. What was the big news hook for interviewing Musk here? The truth is that Twitter put a “government-funded media” label on a BBC News account and Clayton’s interview has led to a promise to replace it with “publicly-funded media” (it has been). That’s really why the BBC is so deliriously happy with Clayton’s ‘scoop’.

But for viewers and listeners — particularly those who are all too familiar with Musk’s schtick — the interview is an embarrassment rather than a triumph. Musk rolled Clayton and it seems he rolled him so effectively that the hack and his bosses haven’t quite realised it yet. The Reality Distortion Field is still live.

---

Thanks to DKD and Toothless Crone for reading today’s draft.

If you liked this edition, please share it…

… and consider upgrading to a paid subscription (you get bonus context and a warm feeling; I get a better footing to keep writing this newsletter)…