“Being a reporter’s hard,” said Jim VandeHei. “Elon Musk sits on Twitter every day, or X today, saying, like, ‘we are the media, you are the media.’ My message to Elon Musk is: Bulls**t. You’re not the media. You having a blue check mark, a Twitter handle, and 300 words of cleverness doesn’t make you a reporter.”

VandeHei’s comments came after he accepted the National Press Club’s Fourth Estate Award. Musk has been on X from Mar-a-Lago zinging the media as he prepares to head the Trump-created Department of Government Efficiency.

The billionaire’s comments irked many in the media, especially since he owns X, and VandeHei showed that he’s one of those miffed with Musk.

The comments were shown on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, which dubbed them “very powerful.”

Jim Vandehei at the Fourth Estate Award Gala held Thursday at the National Press Club, as played Monday on Morning Joe:

JIM VANDEHEI: I hate this damn debate about, oh, “we don’t need the media.” It is not true … There’s something about freedom, capitalism, the animal spirits of democracy, but at the core of that is maybe transparency, maybe a free press, maybe the ability to do your job without worrying to go to jail, maybe the ability to sit in a war zone and tell people what is actually happening so they’re not just looking at distortion, matters.

It matters profoundly. It’s why, it’s not like we just love getting up at 3:00, 4:00 in the morning, doing this every single day, we do it because we love it. We do it because it matters. The work that we do matters. Everything we do is under fire.

Elon Musk sits on Twitter every day, or X today, saying like, “We are the media, you are the media.” My message to Elon Musk is: Bulls**t. You’re not the media. You having – [applause] you having a blue check mark, a Twitter handle, and 300 words of cleverness doesn’t make you a reporter any more than me looking at your head and seeing that you have a brain and telling you have an awesome set of tools makes me a damn neurosurgeon.

Right? Like what we do, what journalists do, what you did in Mississippi, what Al Jazeera does in the Middle East, you don’t proclaim yourself to be a reporter. Like, that’s nonsense. Like being a reporter’s hard. Really hard. You have to care. You have to do the hard work. You have to get up every single day and say I want to get to the closest approximation of the truth without any fear, without any favoritism. You don’t do that by popping off on Twitter. You don’t do that by having an opinion. You do it by doing the hard work.

JOE SCARBOROUGH: Yeah. Come on, slow clap, everybody. First of all, I got to say, extraordinary content. It needed to be said. It continues to need to be said when all of the garbage that’s flying around on social media, lying about reporters, lying about the hard work they do, lying about the hard work editors do, lying about everything up and down about not only their alternative set of facts but alternative set of facts about what people like you do. And I love how you connected reporters in Mississippi in the 1960s to reporters fighting for their life to get the story out in the Middle East today. Jim, it was very powerful.

MIKA BRZEZINSKI: Really good.

SCARBOROUGH: Very powerful.

SEE THE LATEST POLITICAL NEWS AND BUZZ FROM WASHINGTON SECRETS

Brent Baker, the Steven P.J. Wood senior fellow and vice president for research and publications at the Media Research Center, explained our pick: “Arrogance combined with obliviousness. In the face of record low trust in the media, instead of some introspection about why the media have lost the public’s trust, VandeHei decided to instead lash out at the competition, a platform which wouldn’t have such relevance if the legacy media weren’t so discredited. It’s as if Ford responded to exploding Pintos by denouncing the gas mileage claims made by GM.”

Rating: FIVE out of FIVE Screams.