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A possible context is that SpaceX and Tesla have been encountering journalism whose quality has been less than wonderful. And there doesn't seem a good existin
by mncharity 8y ago
A possible context is that SpaceX and Tesla have been encountering journalism whose quality has been less than wonderful.
And there doesn't seem a good existing mechanism to deal with that. Individual journalists with an axe to grind, which if you don't follow their work, you'll not know to take with a grain of salt. Large misinformation campaigns, which the press happily falls for, and afterwards doesn't report on or learn from.
When the Zuma defense satellite deployment failed, it was very quickly clear that Northrop Grumman was at fault. But they ran a congress and press campaign, pointing at SpaceX, generating a press "frenzy" (WSJ's word). It was bizarre to watch the press, from NYTimes front page on down, simply getting the story wrong. For days. Oh, the NYTimes got "facts" right - as in "people are blaming SpaceX" - but with little hint that that was bogus. The campaign was successful in avoiding a public story of "Northrop just burned up a billion dollars!" And afterward? No negative feedback for any of the participants. Some quiet little corrections, some of which required reading between the lines to even recognize as such. No articles about the reporting. No backlash. No postmortems. No sign that next week any of them will do any better.
And Tesla is apparently the largest short on the US stock market. With the press coverage you'd expect from that.
So perhaps Musk encountered a societal failure mode, didn't see anyone else successfully addressing it, and is doing a trial balloon on one possible approach. Hopefully this will at least raise the visibility of the issue.
- ubernostrum 8y agoA possible context is that SpaceX and Tesla have been encountering journalism whose quality has been less than wonderful. Tesla, at least, has been "encountering" problems of its own making. Financial troubles, production troubles, safety troubles with its "autopilot" feature and workplace safety issues for manufacturing employees have all been reported, and I'm unaware of any evidence that such stories were lies fabricated from whole cloth. Rather, those stories seem to be fact-based. If Musk doesn't like the facts, he has the power to change them (by remedying the problems at Tesla). But instead he seems to be in favor of forming his own propaganda outlet to attack those who report the facts.