When advertisers are calling the shots, don’t call it journalism

Was Elon Musk just whining when he accused mainstream media outlets of tilting news coverage against Tesla to favor advertising giants from the incumbent automobile and oil industry?

Mainstream pundits rushed to scoff at Musk’s suggestion that a network’s corporate owner would censor news to please its sponsors. But corporate bias is an old malady with which I’m familiar from a long career as an environmental advocate.

In 2003, when environmental leader Laurie David and Arianna Huffington’s “Detroit Project” attempted to air paid advertisements touting automobile fuel efficiency, all the networks—then raking in $15 billion annually from the auto industry—refused to carry the ads.

“They wouldn’t run them,” Huffington told me, “and we ended basically not being able to use the money that was budgeted to buy airtime.”