Time to change how business news reports about Musk

Casey Newton writes on his Platformer site about how business news organizations cover Tesla CEO Elon Musk and why they must change their tactics.

Newton writes, “For most of you, I realize, it is no longer news that Musk stretches the truth until it disintegrates. At least since he lied about having ‘funding secured’ to take Tesla private, it’s been clear that we should apply a healthy discount rate to everything he says.

“At the same time, it is in the nature of business journalism to assume that CEOs of public companies are not lying all the time. And it’s in Musk’s nature to make frequent, bold pronouncements about his companies, politics, the nature of consciousness, and so on, all of which are irresistible to editors.

“Stories about these pronouncements are dead-simple and cheap to produce — a description of an embedded tweet, followed by 300 or so words of context. And because people read these stories in huge numbers, publishers devote a lot of space to them. (If there’s an Elon Musk tweet that Insider hasn’t written a short post about this year, it’s news to me.)”

Read more here.

Chris Roush

Chris Roush was the dean of the School of Communications at Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Connecticut. He was previously Walter E. Hussman Sr. Distinguished Professor in business journalism at UNC-Chapel Hill. He is a former business journalist for Bloomberg News, Businessweek, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Tampa Tribune and the Sarasota Herald-Tribune. He is the author of the leading business reporting textbook "Show me the Money: Writing Business and Economics Stories for Mass Communication" and "Thinking Things Over," a biography of former Wall Street Journal editor Vermont Royster.