What is with "Business Insider"

bwilson4web

bwilson4web

Well-Known Member
Subscriber
Hi,

I see Business Insider solicits internal Tesla documents. Just it looks like they pretty much publish critical articles versus a more balanced approach. Yes, I understand 'bad news' sells and certainly I have limited experience with them. Am I alone on this impression?

Fox Business definitely has a snarky attitude about Tesla. But then I treat all of Fox as toxic.

CNBC seems critical but without the Fox snark.

Bob Wilson
 
Frankly I don't recall ever reading anything at Business Insider before the flap about Linette Lopez's Tesla-bashing hit pieces made the news. So I don't know what kind of reputation they have in general, nor do I consider them an important news source. When the news is about a news outlet, then you know it's bad!

To be fair, I've seen some fair and balanced articles on Tesla at BI. But obviously they don't have high standards of journalism, since they keep printing Lopez's anti-Tesla FUD. And I really do mean FUD, too; not merely somewhat biased.

What's behind it? I'm guessing just that controversy gathers clicks. If there was actually an editorial policy to promote smear campaigns against Tesla, then we wouldn't see fair and balanced articles about Tesla there. I get the impression that the editors there just don't care about standards of journalism. But that seems obvious; if they did, then they would fire Linette Lopez so fast her head would spin.

I've been quite shocked at CNBC's coverage of Tesla, too. And I find it puzzling, since their parent company, NBC, doesn't seem to have any bias against Tesla. Sometimes CNBC's articles about Tesla step over the line from merely biased to what I'd call outright FUD, too. That is something one rarely sees from a mainstream news source!
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Didn't know the FUD acronym, so I had to look it up on Google. "FUD fəd/ noun noun: FUD; plural noun: FUDs
fear, uncertainty and doubt, usually evoked intentionally in order to put a competitor at a disadvantage." I think that FUD does apply to a lot of Business Insider articles about Green technology in General. I've noticed that articles at Business Insider tend to be global warming/climate change denial prone. So it doesn't surprise me much that they would take the same attitude towards any company with a business model aimed at helping to address the issue.
 
From Wikipedia:

Fear, uncertainty and doubt (often shortened to FUD) is a disinformation strategy used in sales, marketing, public relations, politics, cults, and propaganda. FUD is generally a strategy to influence perception by disseminating negative and dubious or false information and a manifestation of the appeal to fear.
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It's similar to what's called "fake news", but the term FUD indicates fake info created in a deliberate attempt to deceive, to promote a negative and dishonest agenda.

Of course, FUD can be repeated by people who don't have that same agenda. That's the strategy that is now being used so successfully by Russian troll farms; creating FUD that gets people's attention, so innocent people will help spread the FUD far and wide. It's a psychological thing; information which gets people angry and upset tends to attract more attention, and tends to get repeated and spread much more, and faster, on social media.

But others are using the same strategy of "information warfare" that was perfected by Russian troll farms. I'm sure that not all anti-Tesla FUD is created by Russians. I think the source of most of it is professional "short" investors and Big Oil think tanks. Or at least, those are the ones which would seem to have the most obvious motivation to spend that much time "weaponizing" propaganda to create anti-Tesla FUD.
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