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On Monday, the company’s bizarre fight with the media reached new heights. Reveal, the magazine by the Center For Investigative Reporting, published a story that cites more than three dozen sources and alleges the company purposely underreports injuries to bolster its safety record. Here’s what Tesla said, emphasis ours again:

We welcome constructive criticism, but those who care about journalistic integrity should strive for the truth above all. Unfortunately, the writers at Reveal paint a completely false picture of Tesla and what it is actually like to work here. In our view, what they portray as investigative journalism is in fact an ideologically motivated attack by an extremist organization working directly with union supporters to create a calculated disinformation campaign against Tesla.

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Yes, a news outlet that’s revered for outstanding journalism and was just named a finalist for the 2018 Pulitzer Prize in Investigative Reporting is an “extremist organization.”

Tesla, in its attempt to slight Reveal, seems to lack an understanding of how journalism works. Here’s what it said in its blog post: “Since last fall, employees have complained to us that they’ve felt harassed by these reporters after being tracked down on social media, getting unexpected phone calls without knowing how their cell numbers were obtained, and even being visited in Tesla’s parking lot and at their homes unannounced.”

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It’s perhaps unfortunate that workers felt this way, but this is literally what reporting is.

In one breath, Tesla tries to portray itself as a defender of journalistic integrity, while at the same time parroting the same rhetoric Trump and his ilk have relied upon to attack traditional news organizations for the past two years. It’s bullshit, even putting aside the fact that the bizarre “extremist” charge was leveled simply for talking to union supporters.

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Reveal isn’t the first outlet to report on labor allegations, and it isn’t like this story came out of the blue. (Here are previous stories from The Guardian and BuzzFeed, for instance.) The NLRB itself is pursuing a complaint against Tesla, after finding merit to some of the claims. There isn’t some coordinated media campaign to work with the media to unionize the floor at Fremont. These are legal claims being levied by workers, and reporters that cover the company are simply doing their job by publishing stories on them.

But in Tesla’s eyes, that’s apparently an improper track for journalists to take. The message is simple: If you dare to report anything that makes Tesla look bad, you’re either on the take by the union effort, looking to make money by shorting $TSLA somehow, or working against the electrification of cars on behalf of Big Oil, established car companies or some other nefarious force that stands in the way of Elon Musk’s definition of progress.

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Portraying Reveal as having some sort of unseemly motive, with incredibly loaded rhetoric, is merely a way to avoid addressing criticism, and it’s a shameful characterization from a company that says it wants to completely change the way we live. (Indeed, Tesla had no additional comment, when asked on Monday if it had any evidence to support its insinuation that Reveal worked “directly” with union supporters to produce its piece.)

More and more, it comes across like that’s what Tesla actually wants—a distorted outlook on traditional news outlets that falls right in line with Trump’s official take on Fake News. And though Musk fronts like other automakers don’t receive the same sort of treatment, that’s demonstrably false.

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Musk himself has personally taken to Twitter to chastise reporters who cover the company, even as it acknowledges failing to uphold production goals for its existential car, the Model 3 sedan. Last year, he shouted “shame” on a conference call that included journalists, after stories emerged of Tesla allegedly firing workers for supporting a unionization effort.

We said it a year and a half ago, when Musk went apeshit over reports on the fatal crash involving Tesla’s semi-autonomous Autopilot system: that if Tesla wants to become a multi-billion-dollar company, there’s a price that comes with that. It has to be able to withstand scrutiny from a press that has a responsibility to cover the good, and the bad, of the world.