I think people overestimate the fallaciousness of examining the motivations of the speaker. It only applies to the factual and logical matters; the fact that CNBC may or may not hate Tesla or Elon Musk does not affect whether or not tape was used to correct cracks in parts or whether or not people were asked to work in low-quality conditions on pain of firing, or any strictly logical conclusions you may draw from those facts. Those purported facts may be true or false, but whether someone at CNBC has it out for Elon is not a relevant consideration in whether those facts are true or false.

However, it is entirely relevant in determining whether or not the slant of the piece is necessarily factual or whether it has bias, and in determining the probability that the speaker may have left out information unfavorable to the cause they are advancing.

It is a logical fallacy, but it is only a logical fallacy. It is completely relevant in arenas other than pure, strict logic, such as meta-logical analyses about potential biases.

(There's a few other "fallacies" for which this is true too; many of them like affirming the consequent are just straight-up errors, but "appeal to authority", for instance, is a fallacy in Aristotelian binary true/false logic, but in a more realistic probabilistic logic, it can be valid to use it to update your probabilistic beliefs about the world. You just are not logically justified in taking an authority and setting your belief in their statements to a true, mathematical 100.0000...% (which is what the fallacy would be in Aristotelian logic), and you are obligated to make judgments about the quality of the authority as you make the updates.)

What makes you think that CNBC is particularly hard on Tesla?

Anonymous anecdotes aside, the scandalous news they report is that Consumer Reports puts Tesla's reliability in the bottom half -- yes, shock and consernation, the BOTTOM HALF!!! -- of all automobile manufactures.

Of course, 50% all automobile manufacturers are in the bottom half, and sure, it's not where you want to be. But none of the rest get special attention for being so.

Want proof? Do a search for the the following: CNBC consumer reports reliability rating.

What comes up? In order:

1. "Tesla Tanks": https://www.cnbc.com/2019/02/21/tesla-tanks-subaru-soars-in-...

2. "Tesla Slips": https://www.cnbc.com/2018/10/24/tesla-reliability-slips-to-t...

3. "Consumer reports yanks recommendation for Tesla": https://www.cnbc.com/2019/02/21/reuters-america-update-2-con...

4. "Tesla Falls": https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/tesla-falls-after-...

..And so forth.

Note, however, that we didn't search for "Tesla". The spotlight given them is CNBC's bias. There's an entire automobile industry out there, and at any given time, half of it is in the lower half of reliability ratings. But only one is ever given headlines for it.

That's bias.

>* Anonymous anecdotes aside, the scandalous news they report is that Consumer Reports puts Tesla's reliability in the bottom half -- yes, shock and consernation, the BOTTOM HALF!!! -- of all automobile manufactures.*

Actually Consumer Reports placed the Model S at the third-worst of 29 positions, so at the bottom 7%. "Tesla Slips" is actually a pretty mild headline, considering they slipped 6 spots and 8 was the technical maximum.

> Actually Consumer Reports placed the Model S at the third-worst of 29 positions

It was Tesla as a whole that placed 27th of 29 on that list of average lineup reliability (tied with Cadillac at 28th). Tesla tied with RAM for the lowest "most reliable" model ranking at 49 pts, while squeaking by RAM and Volvo for lowest reliability of a model.

There's a saying in news media: If it bleeds, it leads.

The news media loves a hero and loves even more to tear the hero down. The former sells to fans, but the latter sells to everyone.

It would be bias if they were somehow going above and beyond, but look around. The most successful companies in the world receive immaculate coverage when they so much as blink too loudly.

Well the other companies aren’t hyped like Tesla, it wouldn’t be newsworthy, let alone be on the front page of HN. It’s the perception of Tesla that is biased. Countering all the marketing wank, that put them into the spotlight, is what I’d expect from a consumer report.

All the attention is probably net good for Tesla. The media was laser focused on trump and look at the result.

I personally have no opinion about CNBC and their relationship with Tesla. I'm only pointing out that it isn't fallacious to account for possible biases if they do exist. It's not just subjective assessments either; take a look at the short interest on TSLA, and the pricing of the put options around their reporting periods; they have people putting down a lot of money on their anti-TSLA bias, and have from what I've seen, quite frequently taken a bath as a result. (Now, there are reasons to believe that they are overvalued, but that's true of a lot of stocks. TSLA in particular seems to pick up a lot of this sort of behavior way beyond what the performance to date has justified. I can't speak to the future with total confidence, of course, or I'd be getting rich.)

I wouldn't be surprised if they have an anti-Tesla bias, though; while I don't know if CNBC has it, I have observed such a thing definitely exists, at a level above the baseline that any company would be expected to attract. But it seems decently balanced by the above-the-baseline pro-Tesla bias that also exists, so, shrug I guess.

I think it's valuable to know if a source is generally biased in one direction or another, whether there's accuracy in comparison to other major media sources - who knows, we unfortunately don't have a system that makes that easy and obvious, yet.

Problem is, with the fast paced nature of today's life you sometimes read a headline and MAYBE a tiny bit of extra info.

Too many news outlets are using clickbait headlines that sound like a big deal but isn't.