This article [+] explains it pretty succinctly, with as little bias as possible (TL;DR Tesla is the most shorted stock in the US, while also endangering entrenched interests).
EDIT: below content moved up to this comment from danso reply in order to be more concise as well as to keep signal to post ratio high:
I do my best to provide non-biased sources/citations, as well as provide arguments without any intellectual disingenuity. If you can find something that is inaccurate or subjective, please point it out.
It's fairly obvious that the data used by Reveal was manipulated in their sensational Tesla piece, and I'm happy to continue to aggregate additional sources that bear that out. You left out the next six paragraphs that explain why there is no basis in fact for what Reveal wrote.
Note: I have friends and acquaintances who work at Reveal; I used to work at ProPublica, and the social circle of nonprofit journalism is pretty small.
That said, I'm not making an a priori argument that Reveal is right. My objection was to you claiming the DK post has "as little bias as possible", when it seems to be a vigorous defense of Tesla, by a Tesla owner. Again, nothing wrong with stated bias -- I'm objecting to your characterization.
For example, the author has time for rhetoric like this:
> Of course, Reveal has shown no interest whatsoever in fact checking. If you have anything bad to say about Tesla, by all means, give them a call. They'll write an article about whatever you tell them.
Yet this objective article you tout fails to note that Tesla -- about a month after Reveal's initial investigation that Tesla "left injuries off the books" -- belatedly added the injuries that Reveal called out:
> Tesla Inc. recently added more names to its list of injured employees after Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting raised questions about whether the company was counting all of its work injuries, records show.
> The electric car company added 13 injuries from 2017 that had been missing when Tesla certified its legally mandated injury report earlier this year.
Again, feel free to trash Reveal's overall aims and ulterior motives. But an objective critique of their investigation should probably note that Tesla moved to fix the errors that Tesla had previously denied.
I've just left a voicemail with Cal/OSHA and am waiting to hear back. If my statement you replied to turns out to be incorrect, I will post a retraction if my edit window times out.
If it's true that Tesla is hiding workplace industries, this is of course something that I will want to find a way to get answers to at the annual meeting. That is unacceptable regardless of organization.
I appreciate the followup. Note that I'm not defending the Reveal investigation as a whole, for the sake of this argument. The complaint that Reveal is unfairly or disproportionately criticizing Tesla is not for me to decide. My main point is whether the investigation's primary claim -- that Tesla is undercounting reportable injuries -- is valid.
> Step up Reveal, an “independent journalism organization” to start “reporting” on Tesla. Quotation marks are normally considered to denote sarcasm, and boy do I ever mean it.
Sounds like an article committed to defending Tesla. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but "with as little bias as possible" is debatable.
I don't see how you take the writer saying "These people are reporting outright falsehoods and their falsehoods appear to closely match the talking points of a PR campaign" as an indication that they're committed to defending Tesla. If those facts are true, that seems like the sort of thing an unbiased analysis would explain.
Yes, but this purportedly-unbiased analysis does not explain these assertions, and resorts to strawman arguments:
For example:
> The first of their “personal stories” was about how a person involved in developing the factory was told that they can’t use yellow caution tape or beeping forklifts because they offend Musk’s sensibilities. The lack of these things, according to Reveal, could be to blame for the “high” rate of injuries.
You can argue about whether Reveal should have talked to Tesla's former safety lead, but the story doesn't assign blame to lack of yellow or whatever for the rate of injuries. In fact, the story is not about Tesla's "high" rate of injuries. The story notes that Tesla's injury rate in 2017 fell steeply. The point of the story is that, according to Tesla's own internal log, injuries that are mandated to be reported were not listed on the official report.
According to a Reveal followup a month later, Tesla's official injuries report has been amended with the injuries that Reveal accused Tesla of hiding:
The dailykos article doesn't have to agree that Reveal was overall in the right to investigate Tesla, but an objective analysis would note Tesla's actions in response to the investigation.
In fact, if you read the Reveal followup, you'll see that the added injuries don't even make Tesla a particular outlier:
> The additions raise Tesla’s 2017 injury rate to 6.3 injuries per 100 workers, just above the 2016 industry average of 6.2.
So noting the followup, and the adjusted stat, is well within the comfort zone of an article that attempts to objectively defend Tesla. Yet the dailykos writer seems to have completely missed reading the followup and can only throw insults at Reveal. That does not seem like an "unbiased" analysis to me.
[+] https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2018/5/29/1767826/-The-War-...
EDIT: below content moved up to this comment from danso reply in order to be more concise as well as to keep signal to post ratio high:
I do my best to provide non-biased sources/citations, as well as provide arguments without any intellectual disingenuity. If you can find something that is inaccurate or subjective, please point it out.
It's fairly obvious that the data used by Reveal was manipulated in their sensational Tesla piece, and I'm happy to continue to aggregate additional sources that bear that out. You left out the next six paragraphs that explain why there is no basis in fact for what Reveal wrote.