Re:Tesla fired hundreds of employees in past week
by alexasmyths on Saturday October 14, 2017 @11:15PM
(#15475702)
Journalism is hard.
They're not paid a lot, and they have to churn out stories.
They don't have the resources to hire PI's and do interviews, follow people around.
It's just a dude (or dudette) who might have time to ask a few questions, and then put out a story.
So that's it.
I wish it could be more, but what they've done is within reason, so long as it's valid and they're not making it up.
I don't object to statements like that. Your proposal actually make some attempt to quantify proportionality. The article did no such thing: "pro-union workers were among those fired this week." It doesn't say "mostly pro-union workers were fired" or "most vocal pro-union workers were fired." It isn't reflecting someone else's opinion. It's just an attempt to fit a narrative around zero evidence. If they had interesting evidence, they would report that instead!
> It doesn't prove anything - but it looks pretty bad, doesn't it?
No! Because they didn't actually make any interesting statements of fact. Just that some pro-union employees happen to be among the 1% of fired employees, like you would expect in a population of hundreds.
> And it would be irresponsible for the journalist to say 'Musk specifically targeted Union advocates' unless they had some pretty good evidence that this were true. Which would be very hard.
But they are suggesting it anyways. I think that is similarly irresponsible.
Probably they don't want to spend the time gathering statistics before they rush to be the first to publish on this story, but in preliminary reporting like this, I think they should be hesitant to suggest a narrative they haven't made any attempt to confirm.