Tesla and the burning journalism.

I’m sorry to disappoint you right at the beginning. This article is not really about Tesla. It is about journalism, about the individual assessment of information and about a business model that is increasingly running aground. And about the effects on our society.

(Reading time 5 minutes)

An accident. A fire. An electric car

Tesla has been in the news for some time now. Not a day goes by without some news item on all sorts of topics relating to Tesla being made into a story. A tragic accident in southern Switzerland is a good example of how this can sometimes blossom.

A Tesla belonging to a man from Germany collided with the road boundary. The car caught fire and burned out. The driver was killed. Unfortunately, this is a very common occurrence. Around 1.25 million people die in traffic accidents on our planet every year. Around 140 per hour.

Early in the morning of May 15, the Swiss free newspaper “20Minuten” picked up a report from the Swiss news agency “Schweizerische Depeschen Agentur”. Title: “Did the Tesla burn because of an overheated battery?”

This article said that morning:

“The fatal accident on the A2 in Ticino last week could have been caused by the battery in the Tesla, according to the Bellinzona fire department.”

Unfortunately, that’s exactly what the fire department didn’t say at all. Instead:

Translated analogously:

“May 10 – # Car fire on the highway.

In last Thursday’s operation, our volunteer firefighters were confronted with an electric vehicle on fire. The violent impact of lithium-ion batteries may have likely caused a phenomenon called #thermalrunway, which means a steady and unstoppable rise in temperature.

An interesting insight into the topic can be found at http://antincendio-italia.it/il_risk-incendio-nei-veico…/ #firefighting #anticendio #pompieri”

 

Causality is of crucial importance in this matter

The causality between the accident/collision of the vehicle and the fire determines whether it is a journalistic sensational report or a (unfortunately) fairly normal incident.

Because the way it was presented at the beginning of the article, the battery would be the cause of the accident. You have to imagine it: You’re driving in a car like this for no reason at all and suddenly a hellish fire breaks out and you burn to death trapped in the car. That’s a scandal. An outrageous thing.

Or if you present it as described by the fire department, the collision itself is the cause of the accident. So you have an accident, which is accompanied by a violent impact, the car starts to burn and the driver dies. A fairly normal accident. As already mentioned, very unfortunate and tragic. But generally not worth reporting in the national media today. Because, as harsh as it sounds, nobody cares.

Sloppy work or deliberate distortion?

The question I and others had that morning was why the author had published this article in this way. Was it simply a copy-paste of the raw SDA material or did the writer of this article deliberately exacerbate it?

There are probably good reasons for both. Perhaps it was a mixture of both. The article was also published in various forms in other media. Only the NZZ apparently took the trouble on the morning of May 15 to scrutinize things and publish an article that largely corresponded to the facts.

You could and can see from the comments on the articles that readers were rightly outraged by the accident. Rightly in the sense that the version they perceived was that the car itself (or the batteries) was to blame for the accident. Even if that was not the case.

There are very small subtle differences that turn a lame story into a great story

Because Tesla polarizes and almost nobody has no opinion on Tesla, the mere fact that Tesla is in the title of the article is a guarantee for increased traffic (i.e. readership). The article you are reading here will be no different. Anything with Tesla in the title gets a lot of clicks.

Why the media, and it seems that no paper is immune to this temptation, is constantly publishing both positive and negative articles about Tesla has a lot to do with this. What increases click figures even more, and what everyone who publishes on the internet is keen on, is when a piece of content is shared a lot. Content that is either extremely great, extremely sweet or extremely scandalous is shared a lot. Tesla naturally contributes to this effect by consciously or unconsciously serving all three genres again and again.

None of this is journalistically clean

In my opinion, this case is an example of what is going wrong in journalism today. Things are twisted, whether consciously or unconsciously, and small details are changed.

If I hadn’t been intensively involved with electric cars, I would have had the feeling after 50 seconds of reading the 20 Minuten article that these cars are literally a fire hazard and a real danger to everyone (look how the thing blazes!). The difficult thing is: I can only recognize that the article conveys a false picture with considerable specialist knowledge.

The fact is that electric cars burn less on average. When they do burn, they start very slowly. So you have plenty of time to get out of the car. Of course, only if you are still physically able to do so after an accident. However, once electric cars are burning properly, they can cause very intense fires that are difficult to extinguish. This “thermal runaway” described by the fire department is partly responsible for this. There are also many indications that the car was traveling at very high speed. This is because a Tesla can practically not roll over due to its very low center of gravity. This is one of the reasons why Teslas are among the safest cars on the market and regularly receive the best ratings. Without this knowledge, I repeat myself, I would probably have bought (and shared) the story of the burning electric car of death immediately.

What about the things I don’t know about

It was at this point on the morning of May 15 that I felt a chill run down my spine. What if I read other articles about things I have no in-depth knowledge of? I tend to believe the picture painted in articles. If the same story is told in different articles, in different publications, this further supports this effect.

This trust in the media is based on the narrative that journalism is a fundamentally noble caste because it is committed to the truth and the cause. And perhaps it really was once. But I think that is no longer the case today. Because journalism has run out of money.

“It’s always easy to be independent and critical as long as there’s enough “Fxxx-you-money”.

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In journalism today, money has to be earned, and in the case of high-volume newspapers, this is earned in large quantities through clicks.

A system that favors “fake news”

When we hear “fake news”, we often think of completely false reports and Donald Trump, who has appropriated the term for himself and immediately dismisses any critical assessment as fake news. That is a shame.

Stories like this one about the burning Tesla are indeed devastating. A small shift in the facts – without being able to say for sure whether it was intentional or not – and a completely different picture is painted. Many Tesla fans are of the opinion that the media have conspired against Tesla and/or have to write Tesla off because the traditional manufacturers are consciously or unconsciously forcing this on them with their large advertising budgets. I think that’s complete nonsense. It’s much simpler: journalism simply needs the clicks and the money. Tesla is an ideal “partner” for this.

Bonus for clicks

We can see the direction this is taking, for example, in an experiment launched last year by Tamedia, a media company in Switzerland: Employees are to receive a bonus for the most-read articles. Mark Eisenegger, Professor of Communication Sciences at the University of Zurich, is quoted in an SRF radio report as saying the following: He fears that the main incentive is to exaggerate and exaggerate the titles. Eisenegger continues: “Stories that are perhaps not so dramatic would be presented in a gimmicky way.”

This attempt, which I don’t know how it turned out for Tamedia, is an example of where the entire industry is heading. Even large companies such as Der Spiegel do not seem to be immune to this. Whether they pay their employees bonuses or not is of secondary importance. If the figures are what counts and no longer the debate leadership of a few decades ago, then hype and spectacle are systematically replacing thematic depth.

Off to something new

Journalism and the media are becoming more and more skewed in the landscape. A lot of credibility has now been lost among the general public. But anyone who openly addresses these points – as I am doing right now – is all too quickly thrown into the Trump corner. And, let me also say this: of course there is still righteous quality journalism. And many good people.

Like Peter Knechtli, for example, with his portal Online Reports in the Basel region. He was one of the first journalists in Switzerland to venture onto the Internet and is still making a name for himself with high-quality, differentiated articles. You probably can’t earn a decent amount of money with it. If only because you can’t be an ambitious entrepreneur and a committed journalist at the same time.

I think the media need to rebirth themselves. I’m not surprised that only a few media start-ups find their way into reality. It’s not easy to break away from the old and invent completely new models in this field. One representative of this guild is REPUBLIK, an online magazine that is financed without advertising and publishes 3 articles per day. Quality: very high. Is this the future? Doubtful. Whether there is even a future for the media and journalism as we grew up with them? Very questionable. Whether there has to be a future? Not at all. Everything can, nothing has to.

“We don’t need the media or journalism. But we do need a fact-oriented and fact-based, honest, socially broad-based discourse. If this can take place in a more bidirectional, democratic way in future, all the better.

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I can’t tell you how we will get there either. My assessment is that we first have to fall much lower than society. Until even the last person at the back understands that you are allowed to have your own opinion. But your own facts are never negotiable.

Tesla is on fire

And last but not least: I’m not worried about Tesla. Firstly, because everything at Tesla always works out somehow once the drama is over. Secondly, because Tesla benefits enormously from the coverage (whether negative or positive). It would be impossible for Tesla to buy this media attention.

Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla, knows this very well and he fuels this game, consciously or unconsciously it remains to be seen, with beautiful continuity. Just as I finish the article, Musk tweets about the media and how everything is going wrong, feeding the narrative that Big Oil and Big Car companies are paying for the ads and influencing everything. And is toying with the idea of launching an anti-fake news platform.

He can’t add much more fuel to the fire. If he wants to seriously reduce the flow of bad, exaggerated or even false news, he has to stop doing this. To stick with the analogy, he needs to take the fuel out of the fire, so to speak.

20Minuten has adapted the article mentioned several times since May 15. Now it reads: “The death on the A2 in Ticino last week could have something to do with the car’s battery. The police are still investigating.” Changes to an existing article are therefore easily possible at 20Minuten even without labeling. That’s journalism today.