Looking forward to the retractions from all those publications that strongly implied or outright claimed AP was involved.
At least in the mainstream press, they seem to have reported what the police were saying at the time, and indicated that they were quoting the police. For example, from the NYT [1]:
> Two men were killed in Texas after a Tesla they were in crashed on Saturday and caught fire with neither of the men behind the wheel, the authorities said.
> Mark Herman, the Harris County Precinct 4 constable, said that physical evidence from the scene and interviews with witnesses led officials “to believe no one was driving the vehicle at the time of the crash.”
They also attempted to get Tesla's side of the story, but Tesla didn't respond:
> Tesla, which has disbanded its public relations team, did not respond to a request for comment.
I'd be upset with the police for making such confident statements that were contradicted by later investigations. But the media, who may not have had access to the accident scene, seems to have done a reasonable job reporting, at least from what I've seen.
In an ideal world, maybe they'd do an independent investigation instead of relying on police statements, but it's a question of how to allocate resources across all things they could be reporting. It probably makes it more difficult to do this when Tesla won't talk to them.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/18/business/tesla-fatal-cras...
To be fair, that's a little disingenuous given that Musk was literally tweeting denials at press time. Tesla certainly didn't refuse to respond, they had lots of things to say. But the article didn't get them in time so went to press trying to imply they had something to hide.
As far as the media reporting the story: it's fine. It was newsworthy. The "there was no one driving the car" business from the fire chief seems in hindsight to have been the real failing. That quote seems to have been a lot jucier than was warranted. In fact it seems almost certain that someone was manually operating that car via some mechanism or another.
> Since dissolving the team at the beginning of the year, I had hoped that Tesla would try to build a new one, but it doesn’t seem to be the case.
> Instead, Tesla is leaving all press inquiries unanswered and doesn’t seem to comment on any story.
But I agree with you that the local authorities really screwed up here when communicating with the press.
[1] https://electrek.co/2020/10/06/tesla-dissolves-pr-department...
Saying they didn't respond would be fine for almost any other topic, but it's bad reporting for this one.
Then why didn't they update this article? Again, it's not like Tesla didn't say anything relevant. You're making what amounts to a process argument: Tesla didn't respond in the right way and so the Times is allowed to claim that they refused to comment because it's technically true.
But "technically true" isn't what journalism is supposed to be about, and the Times is usually pretty good about that in its hard news coverage. Which is why you can tell that this is really a business/investment story being pawned off as news.
Tesla says that Musk's tweets about autopilot are disconnected from reality:
https://www.theverge.com/2021/5/7/22424592/tesla-elon-musk-a...
So why would and why should anyone else take his tweets seriously?
“A Fatal Crash Renews Concerns Over Tesla’s ‘Autopilot’ Claim” (Wired)
“2 Killed in Driverless Tesla Car Crash” … “no one was driving the vehicle” (NY Times)
“Tesla on Autopilot crashes in Texas” (driving.ca)
“Tesla crash: investigators ‘100% sure’ no one driving car in fatal Texas incident” (The Guardian)
Reporters have a duty to verify their sources and information and not report on rumors or hearsay.
Sure. Here you go.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2021/04/19/tesla-texas...
Headline: A driverless Tesla crashed and burned for four hours, police said, killing two passengers in Texas.
Lede: "Just before midnight Saturday, a Tesla drove swiftly around a curve, veered off the road, struck a tree and burst into flames in The Woodlands, Tex., a suburb north of Houston, police said."
"Driverless" is used here to relate the reader to "Driverless cars," aka "self driving car." Note that the police only said that the driver wasn't in the driver's seat at the time of the crash.
The lede puts the agency for the driving on the car: "a Tesla drove..."
Looks like NBC did it too:
The vehicle, a 2019 Tesla Model S, was driving at high speed when it ran off the road, hit a tree and burst into flames, he said.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/2-dead-tesla-crash-afte...
Here's Yahoo News with a video, headline "2 killed after self-driving Tesla crashes into tree, bursts into flames":
https://news.yahoo.com/2-killed-fiery-tesla-crash-210032357....
But wait, isn't that "technically correct" (the best kind of correct) to what the original investigation said?
Sure! But then why did other news sources go to great lengths to avoid using the phrase? Here's The Verge:
https://www.theverge.com/2021/4/18/22390612/two-people-kille...
"Two people killed in fiery Tesla crash with no one driving"
"Preliminary reports suggest the car was traveling at a high rate of speed and failed to make a turn, then drove off the road into a tree."
Notice the hedging in the paragraph. Notice the use of passive voice "was traveling."
Professional writers know the meaning of words. They know what those words mean to readers. They use them deliberately.
From your The Verge article, that supposedly is the example of trying very hard not to divulge this fact.
> Authorities in Texas say two people were killed when a Tesla with no one in the driver’s seat crashed into a tree and burst into flames, Houston television station KPRC 2 reported.
It's the first line of the article.
> Preliminary reports suggest the car was traveling at a high rate of speed and failed to make a turn, then drove off the road into a tree. One of the men killed was in the front passenger seat of the car, the other was in the back seat, according to KHOU. Harris County Precinct 4 Constable Mark Herman told KPRC that “no one was driving” the fully-electric 2019 Tesla at the time of the crash. It’s not yet clear whether the car had its Autopilot driver assist system activated.
That's the third paragraph. I don't think they're hiding that they're parroting police officials.
I don't think it has anything to do with smearing Tesla. I think that people have anxiety about self-driving cars and publications know that, so they play to that. This isn’t about Tesla, or AutoPilot. It’s about getting the details right.
If these publications are claiming to quote the police, they're doing a shitty job of it, because the police said only that there wasn't anyone in the driver's seat at the time of the crash. The police didn't comment on auto pilot, didn't comment on the car being "driverless" (which would imply that it never had a driver to start with, which it did. If someone takes their hands of the wheel to stop their kids in the back seat from fighting, does the car become driverless for that moment? If so, where are all the other news stories calling those crashes driverless? Car accidents happen all the time while the car is cruise control. Is that driverless? Why not? It's essentially the same technology that Tesla has for adaptive cruise control).
A writer in the LA times straight up called for federal regulators to step in based off this. I've seen newspapers go full activist before in the past but this was shocking because they were doing so based off of what is obviously a false premise.
It doesn't take long to speak to a few Tesla owners and realize that autopilot even the non-FSD doesn't operate this way.
The media moves on to its next money-making event. No real repercussions are to be found.
This is simply not true.
Almost every day media around the world are subject to libel lawsuits. Recently, Newsmax and Fox News were sued by Dominion Voting Systems and their employees and Meghan Markle sued Daily Mail for publishing personal letters.
And most of the respectable news organisations still abide by the core tenets of journalism e.g. multiple, vetted sources.
And which ones are those?
https://www.bizpacreview.com/2019/12/28/rachel-maddows-defen...
Turns out, that was all nonsense too:
https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a36189237/tesla-model-s-fi...
Better form would have been not publishing reactionary articles in the first place.
> It was "strongly implied" because no one was in the driver's seat. Now there is evidence there was a driver, after an investigation. Why should they retract anything?
A publication which does not retract or correct misinformation is a key part of the problem.