If this were the report about the Tesla autopilot crash, I would totally agree with you. In that instance, where the investigation was conducted by a government

If this were the report about the Tesla autopilot crash, I would totally agree with you. In that instance, where the investigation was conducted by a government entity, linking to Tesla's release about the investigation would have been the wrong move, because the release would be spin on something that journalists, or we as readers, could assess for ourselves directly (the actual independent report), so there would be no reason to get it via Tesla's PR filter. In this instance, though, they are unfortunately one and the same. The data upon which they are basing their conclusions (the actual telemetry from their sensors, etc.) is not public. Nobody is as informed as they are about their results, so any cross examination of their results would be de facto incomplete. Note that NYT is fully aware of this, also: their article is not reporting on what happened during the explosion, it's reporting on what SpaceX says happened during the explosion, because that's all that can be done given publicly available information.