Tesla, the New York Times and the levelling of the media playing field

Edwin Ritter:

As Tesla and the NYT go toe to toe, they are using media tools to make their case. This could be a precedent for firms to directly engage a media company in a war of words. I am interested to see how this will play out. Who will the next to ‘battle’ a review it disagrees with?

Originally posted on paidContent (old):

If you’ve been following the back-and-forth recently between pioneering electric-car maker Tesla Motors and the New York Times — which published what the company thought was an unfair review of its vehicle — you know that it has become a war of words in which both sides are claiming the moral high ground and using every tool at their disposal to win support for their position. What’s interesting about this incident from a media perspective is that the two sides are far more evenly matched than they would have been at almost any other time in history.

As my GigaOM colleague Katie Fehrenbacher has pointed out in her overview of the story, what started out as a simple review of the Tesla S — and a demonstration of Tesla’s new “supercharger” stations on the Eastern seaboard — turned into a massive PR battle between the company’s CEO Elon Musk…

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