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Comment by hackuser | Hacker News Reader

> There probably aren't other sources besides SpaceX that are better equipped to report on an investigation conducted by SpaceX

I disagree; SpaceX has a clear interest (and a well-established track record) of presenting things in a way that bolsters their image. Outside experts could provide critiques of the report: What represents bad luck, what is trivial, and what is a serious error; where is SpaceX being straightforward and where are they spinning things; where are the gaps, where are there alternative analyses of the same data, and what seems solid.

That is a big reason why journalism is important: It provides context and other voices.

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That's all fine and good, but the only source NYTimes article you suggested is SpaceX, so you're not getting commentary from any outside experts. Instead, you are just getting quotes and paraphrases from this and previous SpaceX press releases.

It's just one article of many possibilities. Also, they still can contextualize info and filter out spin.

Incidentally, any time you post something that isn't fully saturated with the SpaceX Kool-Aid, you get a strong reaction. Look at all the comments and the downvoting over a pretty mundane detail and a common concern: Don't link to a press release. I didn't even criticize the Great and Powerful Wizard or his rocket ships.

To be clear, I don't care about the votes, but I think the overall response says more than the comments.

You keep talking about hypothetical advantages of outside articles. But you linked to a specific article which provides none of those advantages. I don't think you're being downvoted for not being sufficiently reverent of SpaceX. You're being downvoted for making a bad recommendation and defending it with irrelevant points.

>downvoting over a pretty mundane detail and a common concern: Don't link to a press release.

I didn't downvote your comments but I can see why you got them: you provided an NYT article that wasted readers' time.

Yes, it's wise to be skeptical of "press releases" to avoid spin but your rigid adherence to avoid-press-releases-at-all-costs put you on autopilot and caused you to link an article that was worse than the press release.

Now, you think the downvotes are about disagreeing with your principles about press releases when it may just be downvotes about that specific NYT article that added no value.

Sure, when Apple makes a press release, readers would be better off skipping their corporate marketing fluff and look at the Ars Technica writeup that will be more critical. However, the NYT writeup of SpaceX's accident report isn't an analogous example value-added journalism. (The newswriter Kenneth Chang is not a rocket scientist and can't offer any expert counterweight to the press release.)

This comment attributes many things to my thinking that are the creation of the commenter, some of which are contradicted by what I wrote myself, such as:

> you think the downvotes are about disagreeing with your principles about press releases

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.

Journalism is important.

Journalism is not regurgitating press releases.

A journalist would have tried to find experts able to comment on the SpaceX release to reveal information that was obfuscated or omitted.

The NYT article you linked was not journalism. If you want to wave the "do not link to press releases" banner, do not link to press releases :D

Since outside experts didn't provide critiques of the report, what makes this article better?

If you linked to an article that provided such things, I'd see your argument. But you linked to something that just regurgitated the press release, and said it was better than the press release. If outside experts didn't provide critiques, the fact that they could is meaningless.

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