Going by the number of seemingly poorly researcher articles with an anti-Tesla bias published at Seeking Alpha, one has to wonder, is there an institutional bias at work?

To be clear here, well researched and argued articles on Tesla with a negative slant aren’t an issue on their own — the company certainly has its faults. But the very poorly researched, and sometimes incoherent, anti-Tesla articles that have been published on the site in recent years does make me wonder…

As noted recently on the TMC forum by “LBusDoor90,” there seems to be too much uninformed or illogical bias for it to be an accident: “Either shorters are the largest investment group to dangle clickbait for or something is truly slanted at Seeking Alpha (perhaps due to the known, concerted anti-EV effort being funded by the Koch bros?). Am I the only one that thinks the timing and tenuous connection to reality of this latest effort (and many other recent ones) there is a joke?”

The commentator referred to this beauty here as an example: “Social Data Sours On Tesla.” That’s an article that’s hard to defend in any way, in my opinion.

A good reply to the discussion was made by “tander,” who noted: “Their problem is they are trying to get authors to always make ‘actionable’ claims in their articles, because it gets clicks and sounds important. But the truth is most authors don’t have the training/understanding/data/work ethic to competently give ‘actionable’ advice positive or negative, so they end up making actionable claims without the actual info or record to back it up, and they skip doing balanced analysis so they inevitably go towards negative to get attention. That’s why you get some authors that are consistently wrong, but very confident sounding about it. I counted one time I think it was John Peterson or Santos, they had like 50+ negative articles which were overwhelmingly wrong in hindsight, and yet they keep writing like they are experts on the subject. Seriously, they should write an assertiveness article on the phenomena: fake it till you make it. If you say it’s gonna rain every day in the desert, you’ll probably still be right once or twice a year, which is enough for some people.”

A good point. As noted in the comment, people can often be consistently, fundamentally wrong (or a liar) without losing an audience so long as they project a “confident” persona.