As someone who's tried, with varied success, to work with reporters on technical stuff, I don't subscribe to "the somewhere in the middle" view.
To us geeks, often, stuff is either true or not true, with no room for maybe.
To reporters, they're both trying to understand what's happening without direct knowledge as well as convey that in a way a layperson can understand. Unfortunately, in that game of telephone, a lot of important details get lost.
I also think reporters deal with imperfect information and rely on their judgement to determine if any particular detail is important to the overall narrative, often influenced by the competing agendas of the players involved.
What's great (rare) about this story is there's published data, the validity of which no one disputes (yet), to chew over.
And I don't get how there's this perception here on HN that Tesla's data is ironclad.
The logging routines were probably written by humans, so there could be bugs in them. Logs are usually written to text files, which can be edited. The people interpreting the data could be making mistakes with the analysis before it even gets to Musk (look at all the posts about the problems with Excel on HN in the past couple of days).
Tesla's a startup. Startups can be a little chaotic. Their procedures and controls with respect to their data may not be as robust as, say a credit card company's, yet there's this big presumption that the data is all good and pure.
I would give Tesla the benefit of the doubt, since it would be very stupid to doctor up the data, but let's not all kid ourselves and not assume that Tesla's not going to shade their "analysis" in a way that is favorable to their argument. It's not much different than what the NYT reporter and the NYT are doing.
To us geeks, often, stuff is either true or not true, with no room for maybe.
To reporters, they're both trying to understand what's happening without direct knowledge as well as convey that in a way a layperson can understand. Unfortunately, in that game of telephone, a lot of important details get lost.
I also think reporters deal with imperfect information and rely on their judgement to determine if any particular detail is important to the overall narrative, often influenced by the competing agendas of the players involved.
What's great (rare) about this story is there's published data, the validity of which no one disputes (yet), to chew over.