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Your hypothesis is playing out already. I just saw a piece on CNBC a few minutes ago talking about the negative NYT Tesla review where they mostly talked about how glowing the reviews have been for the Tesla S and how as a company they are really doing well. My overall impression is that people were taking the NYT review with a grain of salt even before Musk called BS. But NYT also called BS on him, so let's see whose numbers add up.

Machines lie constantly. Get some filter oil on your mass airflow sensor, and watch your ECUs nose grow. Hell, we almost nuked the russians, and them us, due to a lying machine :)

Well then you're changing the parameters of the question :)

Machines do what people tell them to do. All NYT has to do is claim Tesla faked the log data.

True that. However, that would be a bit of a stretch. A more likely outcome is great coverage in short course for Tesla and another short tone-it a-couple-of-notches-down by NYTimes on the third page.

Unless of course there is legal entanglement.