Tesla Bears — Quarterly Hibernation or Facing Extinction? — #Pravduh About #Tesla Report 11

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Intro

This week we broke a record — the smallest number of articles about Tesla. While there is merit to the argument that bad press is still press, Tesla doesn’t need it. Not only does this allow Elon Musk to do his work undisturbed, but it also allows us to focus on the product rather than the drama, and the products do speak for themselves anyways. Has profitability made a difference? Who knows? In any case, the summer is over, and so is the time for short shorts.

In previous weeks, you might have wondered why our recurring headlines chart addresses fewer than half of the news articles and not all of them. The answer lies in the fact that the other articles are about various topics that cannot sensibly be grouped together in a useful way. Usually, those articles are not “breaking news” pieces, but simply opinion pieces.

This slow news week allows us to show you exactly what we mean. In this next paragraph are the topics of the various articles not listed in the recurring headlines chart. Usually, there are a lot more stories that would make this list two times longer, at least.

All these topics represent only one headline each:

Tesla vs. World, Recharge in 30min, Kimball, DOJ, Logistics Hell, Tesla vs. VW, board change, customer story, Fisker, M3 sales, new chairwoman, Gigafactory housing, boring bricks, wildfire, US Congress, Model 3 production, lawsuit, Model 3 orders, quiz, Starman, tweet, S&X perks, junk debt, fake Elons on twitter, new chairwoman, Tesla lead myth, neuralink, senior employee departure, 7000 Model 3s produced per week, Gigafactory, Steve Wozniak, a short turnaround, Mars, Tesla’s journey.

Remember, we also share the raw data (headlines and scores) for #Pravduh. You can scan through it yourself if you want to double check our findings or just see the headlines. You can aslo check out our own Tesla stories for more context and comparison.


#Pravduh About #Tesla
Report #11 (November 10–16)

 

Aside from the websites featured above, “Other” this week includes: WSJ (0 — 1 — 0), CNN (1 —0 — 0), The Verge (1 — 0 — 0), Guardian (1 — 0 — 0), New York Times (0 — 1 — 0), VOX (1 — 0 — 0). Because there are so few this week, we decided to not make an “Other” chart.

The next matter on our itinerary is tracking the authors who covered this news. While the whole list is too long to put here since there are many authors who have written just one piece about Tesla, here are the 30 who published more than 8 articles about Tesla since we started tracking on September 1st, ranked from least positive to most positive:

The neutrality index goes from -100% to positive 100%. In this system, 0% is neutral. The number of negative/positive articles and percentages are also still displayed. This system provides a good breakdown of how authors are positioned.

(For this entire section, note: At major media outlets, there are often headline writers who control this part of articles, but we find tracking the authors is also interesting and potentially useful for considering what kind of stories the authors tend to write.)

Again, here is the data from this past week in case you want to have a closer look at the raw data.

What Changed With Tesla Last Week

Aside from the summary in the intro, here’s a summary of Tesla news and potential news ordered by day. You can consider for yourself what were objectively the important updates in the “Tesla story” last week.

  • Tesla working on improved battery cells (13 Nov)

Reported only by: CNBC

  • Tesla, GM, and Nissan form a coalition to fight for the EV tax credit (13 Nov)

Reported by: Wired, TechCrunch, The Street, Engadget, Bloomberg

  • Tesla launches an Anti-Theft Sensor as an upgrade (13 Nov)

None of the sites we track wrote about this news

  • European Tesla Model 3 will have a CCS plug (14 Nov)

Reported only by: Engadget, Reuters, and CleanTechnica

  • Tesla hopes to achieve 7,000 per week production rate by November 28th (15 Nov)

Reported only by: Business Insider

  • Tesla cuts prices on solar systems (15 Nov)

Reported only by: Reuter, CNBC, and CleanTechnica

Some Sneaky Headlines Last Week

  • Can Tesla Maintain Its Positioning As VW Doubles Down On The EV Market? (Forbes)
  • Why the short seller who “hated” Tesla decided to buy the stock (CNBC)

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Our Methodology

As you have seen, we track Tesla headlines and rate them based on their implications for Tesla. We cover 22 major media sites. We rate all of their Tesla headlines as either positive, negative, or neutral. Unlike a more nuanced scale, this system is based on solidly objective evaluation and contains minimal bias. A handful of us have been checking the headlines and we do not find much variation in how a headline is rated, because it is a straightforward and clear system. If there is variation in how a headline is rated, we discuss and come to an agreed conclusion.

We define journalism as: the pursuit of facts and reporting on them. When you systematically report with a slant that doesn’t line up with reality, or omit facts that are inconvenient to your point of view, that distorts the general truth. In order to be as transparent as possible, all the data our analysis is based on are published at the end of each report. We report the facts and let you draw your own conclusions about the story behind these stories.

We encourage you to check our data and have fun experimenting in the evaluator role — that is can be even more illuminating than simply looking at the results. We also encourage you to let us know if you notice something that was rated incorrectly or have suggestions on how to further improve our system.


#Pravduh History & Extra Context

The CleanTechnica team started creating weekly and monthly #Pravduh About #Tesla reports in September 2018 after getting really tired of oddly negative Tesla coverage in mainstream media outlets, and after a little stimulation from some trolling by Elon Musk.

For those who somehow missed it, about 5 months ago, Elon Musk got fed up with so much of the media publishing FUD (fear, uncertainty, and doubt) articles about Tesla, and in some cases outright misinformation, that he presented an idea.

Most people who follow Tesla closely agree that it has been the target of far too much misleading, unfair, negative media coverage. We here at CleanTechnica define journalism as: the pursuit of facts and reporting on them in a useful, proper context. When you systematically report with a slant that doesn’t line up with reality, or omit facts that are inconvenient to your point of view, that distorts the general truth of the story.

We at CleanTechnica felt something did need to be done. As the stories — whether in the New York Times, New York Post, Forbes, Business Insider, CNBC, or Bloomberg — got worse, we were finally pushed to more systematic, regular action. Writers on our site had long been informing readers about Tesla FUD and misinformation, and readers had been informing writers. We wrote articles digging into the facts and the finances. But sporadic, one-off attempts at correcting the record didn’t seem to be enough. Putting our own playful spin on the “Pravda” name Elon mentioned on Twitter, we decided to create #Pravduh About #Tesla.

Of all the parts of a story, the headlines have the biggest influence — by far — so we decided to focus our efforts on headline analysis. We have found the results to be very interesting so far, and we’re super curious to see how they evolve over time. Apparently, Elon is interested in this as well.

We would also like to thank Maye Musk for her support of this project and for using the data to try to improve Tesla coverage.

We would also like to thank Zac & Jesse from the YouTube channel “Now You Know” for spreading the word about our reports and the Tesla FUD.

The more these #Pravduh About #Tesla reports get shared online through social media, the more people will take notice. If there is an ongoing heavily negative slant about Tesla in certain outlets — even as Tesla has so much positive news to share — people should be aware of this and approach each new story with that in mind.


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Chanan Bos

Chanan grew up in a multicultural, multi-lingual environment that often gives him a unique perspective on a variety of topics. He is always in thought about big picture topics like AI, quantum physics, philosophy, Universal Basic Income, climate change, sci-fi concepts like the singularity, misinformation, and the list goes on. Currently, he is studying creative media & technology but already has diplomas in environmental sciences as well as business & management. His goal is to discourage linear thinking, bias, and confirmation bias whilst encouraging out-of-the-box thinking and helping people understand exponential progress. Chanan is very worried about his future and the future of humanity. That is why he has a tremendous admiration for Elon Musk and his companies, foremost because of their missions, philosophy, and intent to help humanity and its future.

Chanan Bos has 118 posts and counting. See all posts by Chanan Bos