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Comment by bksenior | Hacker News Reader

I applaud the NYT attempt to come out and acknowledge what happened and ask for a "fair fight" from both parties. This is much stronger than a lame PR statement. Also the links to Reddit conversations off-site are a great testament to just how much journalism has changed in the past decade. Can't wait to see who wins this heavyweight fight.

slowly reaches for popcorn

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Wouldn't it have been nice if the NYT went out and bought a couple of GoPros before the test drive? Musk obviously improved his recordkeeping, how hard would it have been for the NYT to up their game as well?

This is what blows my mind in both directions:

1) A reporter not recording everything he does in the age of GoPro and a 2 TB harddrives at Best Buy.

2) Tesla did record damn near everything: GPS, battery, display, temperature (internal and target), charge duration, etc.

Metrics are king, and I think we are ushering in a new age of "you can't bullshit me, I recorded it too" journalism.

Or, we are entering in a new age of "if you can't write your story with the same rigor as a top law firm would write an M&A contract, I'll hang you with your every choice of wording".

It's possible a damning story in an influential newspaper could have as much impact on Tesla's business as an M&A contract.

If I were the journalist I would have got my facts checked with Tesla. If I were Tesla, I would have checked that my response was ironclad, especially when accusing a journalist of lying. Now, they have two problems.

I think a raw recording of the entire trip inside the cabin is a pretty personal thing to ask for someone used to only having a heavily reviewed and edited public facade. Then there's the matter of hosting all that video, and of successfully summarizing it into a form that's both properly balanced and digestible by a the audience. Certainly doable, but it's a new skill-set that would take time to develop.

I was not trying to imply that this data should be generally available, just that he should have access to it as definitive proof, at least to his superiors.

Same here. Since you really can't take notes while driving, I would have used some in-car video as a form of notetaking and nothing else.

Well, let's remember, Musk didn't start recording so much until the TopGear thing happened.

Everything was great up until the end. I thought this line was completely unnecessary:

  I hope to post again Friday with some conclusions but for 
  now, based on a day’s reporting, I will say this much: I 
  reject Mr. Musk’s central contention that Mr. Broder’s 
  Sunday piece was faked in order to sabotage the Model S or 
  the electric-car industry.

I also reject that Broder was in the pocket of the oil industry as redditors are claiming, but I have little doubt that Broder didn't embellish parts just make the story juicier and more readable. Since he writes about energy mainly, his role was probably more to review the supercharging network than the car. But reviewing the network makes for a pretty boring story and having an article that is controversial and paints the tesla as a dud, looks like a classic news hook. This reminds me of the death of Jan Berenstein, author of the Berenstein, and the Slate article that declared that she was a bore and exclaimed "good riddance" [0]. After that post came out there was a good follow up analyzing the journalist motivations in that piece and the allure of the "news hook" [1]

It's unfortunate that this journalist was willing to trade their integrity for more pageviews. Karma's a bitch.

[0] http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2012/02/27/jan_berensta...

[1] http://www.themillions.com/2012/04/the-berenstain-bears-and-...

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