Btw I am referring to this post https://www.reddit.com/r/teslamotors/comments/j595ns/so_tesl... , it was stickied yesterday and I think is legit.
My only idea why you would do that is if you anticipate a lot of bad press so then your strategy is to label it as "fake news" or "shorting" and label critics as puppets and videos that show problems as deep fakes.
Let me know why do you think this is a good idea though.
P.S. I can enumerate random stuff some journalists did wrong, and bad/evil things companies did wrong, and horrible things marketing/PR done ... is not a proof to find some unrelated example, there needs to be some logic to it.
Now to address you actual point, what would a PR person do here exactly? "Tesla is investigating the issue and will not provide any comments at the current time"? They fixed the car so their internal metrics will ensure that whatever issue caused this will get fixed. It's not economically sensible to fix any percentage of cars right after delivery.
I understand that Tesla light passions and that PR has got (ironically) bad PR in the last few years, but I fail to see how your comment is related to the issue.
My point was this: OP said something like "press is evil, Tesla does not need PR"
My point: I would like that maybe 3 paid journalists contact the customer, the dealership and Tesla(so PR contact needed for Tesla) and 3 articles are published with this 3 different sources rather then each individual attempt to contact on it's own the involved parties and try to find the truth.
The same reason we need them for any other set of reasons: To do full-time work investigating different angles of current events and to provide, often, a less-biased report on things.
Of course, eliminating PR =/= eliminating journalists, so this comment is off the tracks anyway.
That's a hugely broad question. Many are.
This isn't what a journalist does at all though and I think they're pretty honest about this if asked.
At best they take the facts and induce bias to provide them in a way that is most palatable to their audience and mirrors the belief of their audience to get more views and therefore more ad impressions. At worst they see themselves as a class above normal people and their job is to ensure the people below them think the right way.
Essentially in a world where the actual events is transmitted via video over social media moments after they occur, seems pretty redundant that we need it filtered through biased individuals who's business only existed because newspapers used to be the most efficient way of doing that.
Firstly, this was Tesla’s PR team, not journalists. As a company, you’d think they would want people whose role is to talk to the public (consumers or journalists), as people not trained in that capacity doing so can quickly get you into trouble. One misstep can get you a visit from the SEC or cost you market share. Given Musk’s history of foot-in-mouth disease, this seems like a pretty awful business move.
Secondly, though your point about journalists and papers isn’t really hyper-relevant to having a pr team: journalists do the job of a) filtering out the noise (useless info), b) filtering out the lies from corporations, government, or people, c) investigating issues of public interest, and d) alerting the public when these issues are important or problematic. While individuals could do this themselves, we don’t all have the time, and it makes sense to have people who do this professionally (and better). The role of the free press has been this for a long time, and the calls against the press are a coordinated strategy by groups whose interests are opposed to knowledge being in public hands and who fear being investigated.
Yeah we should get our Tesla information from the unbiased source that is Elon Musk!
Seems utterly absurd to be a company that actually builds something of value from nothing to be required to court and curry favor with individuals who only exist to talk about the work of creators and hope they talk about your work positively when instead you can just bypass them and be the master of your own narrative.
1. You can't do without some press coverage, because you want to sell to people who aren't already superfans.
Toyota sold 10.7 million cars in 2019 and has 803,000 Twitter followers. If their message only appears on Twitter, the vast majority of their customers and potential customers will not see it.
Of course, the press might find your tweets and report on them, but:
2. Given that you want press coverage, having friendly relations with the press is a good thing.
3. If you're a company, the status quo that you're generous with review units and access, and journalists aren't very rigorous or probing in their reviews, is just fine with you.
Traditionally companies have a hard time trusting that their customers will want the right thing.
The fact that this was ever considered related to journalism is hilarious.