Outrage at Musk-Taibbi 'Twitter Files' dump revealed media are the true 'bots,' some critics say

The mainstream media's almost uniform response to journalist Matt Taibbi's Elon Musk-sanctioned dump of internal Twitter files detailing the censorship of the Hunter Biden laptop story revealed the true "bots" online are the press itself, Greg Gutfeld said on "The Five" Monday.

Gutfeld highlighted that media figures from NBC reporter-pundit Ben Collins and across the board all characterized Taibbi as doing "P.R. for the world's richest man."

Other pundits blasted Taibbi for allegedly turning against the progressive journalism that made him a name during the Occupy Wall Street protests of 2011 because they view Musk as an anti-establishment figure.

Gutfeld suggested the sudden barrage directed at Taibbi and Musk from the media and the left was still eye-opening.

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"The real story about that accusation that Matt Taibbi is doing PR work for Musk – that's not the story. The story is the cut-and-paste of it all," he said. "It was a uniform response of dozens of blue-checkers that said the same thing. 'He's doing work for Musk.'"

"It's something, again, that we always suspected to be true," Gutfeld added. "And now it's being verified that there are marching orders. We just don't know where they come from. But there was some tweet; there was a sentence that was sent to all of these people that say he's doing PR for the world's richest man that showed up everywhere."

Gutfeld argued Musk's Twitter revelation shows the media relies on "imaginary numbers" in terms of who is in favor of or opposed to their message-du-jour. If someone opposes that message, they are essentially pressured to back down.

"That in itself is its own form of censorship – to create this mob of like, ‘Oh my God, all these people feel the same way,'" he said.

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That shows the press doesn't come up with such messaging themselves, he said, suggesting the Democratic Party or some other leftist-establishment entity is disseminating the message.

"The media now functions as bots. The NBC disinformation correspondents [are] a bot. Ben Collins is a bot. The thing that he tweeted was tweeted everywhere else. How hilarious is it that the disinformation specialist is himself a disinformation bot. He should call himself out. He might get a promotion," the "Gutfeld!" host joked.

Judge Jeanine Pirro later added that many of the media figures parroting the same message against Musk and Taibbi should be condemned.

She pointed to former Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele, who claimed on MSNBC that putting some of the censored data back on Twitter "juxtapos[es] with the argument that [Musk] is all about free speech."

Pirro ripped the former Maryland lieutenant governor, asking when it is okay to qualify free speech as being made "at the harm or expense of someone else."

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"Why do we have defamation laws? If it harms you, sue. And then let me see if I got this right. Everything that we've been talking about since October of 2020 now [about Joe Biden's alleged connection to Hunter's business dealings], according to the White House press secretary, is old news," she said.

"And so in 2020, the story was censored, any discussion was censored. The FBI warns Twitter during weekly meetings… How easy would it have been to confirm that this laptop was legitimate and that the emails on it were legitimate? They didn't want to."

"Did it ever occur to them that the reason the [New York] Post ran this thing is because they know the defamation laws? They wouldn't have published it, but for the fact that they could show that it was not defamatory," Pirro concluded.