BBC reporter taken to task over Elon Musk interview

James Clayton sat down with Elon Musk to discuss his first six months as the owner of Twitter earlier this week, however the interview was hit with backlash as many viewers claimed it was “biased”. Reviewing the conversation on BBC’s Newswatch, Samira Ahmed quizzed Clayton over why he could not offer up examples of hate speech when asked to by Musk and why he failed to ask about controversial subjects such as Space X and the war in Ukraine.

Clayton began: “This is Elon Musk, he’s a chaos merchant and you’d have to prepare for anything that might happen.”

Ahmed hit back: “Well when you asked about hate speech for example, a big important issue, he asked for examples and you didn’t have any. Shouldn’t you have been better prepared?”

“Yeah, so I actually think that specific bit was actually just a tactical error from me,” Clayton said.

“I shouldn’t have engaged and I think that’s part of, I just shouldn’t have engaged with that particular question.

“At the time when I was thinking about it, I had tonnes of examples of hate speech I could have given him but I didn’t want to continue to go down that path because I’d already made the tactical error of engaging with it.

“I should have just said, it’s not about me, whether Twitter is filled with hate or not, is not about my Twitter feed.

“But you know we sat down for 90 minutes in total, there are going to be moments where Elon Musk is a very slippery character, where you don’t get the better of him in certain questions and certainly what Elon Musk can do because he’s the most followed person on Twitter, he can make moments go viral.

“So people look at those moments and maybe haven’t watched the full interview, which is once again stacked with lines, it’s full of things we had no idea Elon Musk thought and I pushed back on him very hard in numerous areas.

“I found it to be a really interesting interview and it was a real rollercoaster in many ways and it kind of reflected Elon Musk in many ways.

“He was sort of quite thoughtful at times, quite emotional at times and then quite aggressive at times, that’s how it felt.”

Ahmed continued, questioning: “Elon Musk said, ‘Ask me whatever you want,’ but you didn’t ask about the Thai cave dive rescue story or Space X or the controversial things he said about Ukraine and all that time you had. Why not?”

“Yeah so the agreement we had before was we were going to do a six month take on his first six months as Chief Executive of Twitter,” Clayton defended.

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“We could have stayed and done hours more interview but at that point, firstly that’s not what we agreed.”

Ahmed cut in: “He said, ‘Ask me anything you’d like,’ you were live streaming, you could have asked. What would he have done?”

Clayton was put on the spot as he responded: “That was right at the start of the interview, we said we’re going to do an interview on the first six months of your tenure at Twitter and he said, ‘Ask me anything you like,’ and that was about those six months and that’s what we agreed to.”

BBC Breakfast airs daily on BBC One at 6am.

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