Well the person in charge of safety at Tesla, Laurie Shelby (https://www.linkedin.com/in/laurie-shelby-cih-csp-8142435/), worked at Alcoa before (https://www.businessinsider.com/how-changing-one-habit-quint...). Alcoa has a pretty good track record in actually caring.

Gaining true knowledge about a situation is not possible without establishing a chain of trust. Whose reporting do you trust ? Each person in the chain needs to be evaluated individually and re-evaluated when new information comes to light.

Right now I rather trust what Tesla says when I hear horrendous claims like until proven otherwise. Especially since news media are not independent. They rely almost entirely on advertisement which is a direct relation to "most eyeballs moved away from other 'free' options", which is directly related to the impact of the headline.