I'll recount tomorrow, but I just went through the new Times piece, and saw 17 different sources they quoted from. The sources varied from anonymous posters here and on the Times website, to various writer's of online pieces, Elon Musk, and some of the words of a Columbia University professor at their Digital Journalism Center.
Not sure why you call him a "professor", but neither the article, nor his bio on towcenter.org say that Taylor Owen (sounds like the Center is named after him, "established in early 2010") would be a professor. His title appears to be "research director".
In the article by him ("blog":
What the Tesla Affair Tells us About Data Journalism | Tow Center for Digital Journalism) that was quoted in the NYT, his final conclusion is:
So, to recap. The Tesla Affair reinforces that: data does not equal fact; that context matters enormously to data journalism; that trust and documentation are even more important in a world of data journalism; and that companies will continue to prioritize positive PR over good journalism in reviews of their products.
In the body, he argues that, based on the premise that data is presented in a context, the data more or less can be deconstructed (my expression) to meaninglessness. While he mentions that Margaret Sullivan states “problems with precision and judgement”, he does not mention that this conclusion was reached based on exactly that data which he claims is context dependent.
In reality, the data directly contradicts Broder's original account, at least in not-so-insignificant details. Whereas he claims: "the only person who can provide the needed context to this data is Broder, the reviewer himself". He does not address these contradictions with the data, which have become central to the role the data played in these events.
Ironically, in his cautionary statements about the validity of information, he claims "the one clear reality about the Model S" would be that "they lose significant charge when not plugged in during cold weather". However, this is not only not clear, but certainly not true in the way "revealed in the review". It turns out that most (or at least a large part) of the apparent loss is only in the displayed numbers, in the range estimate made by the display software, not actually in the battery. (See also my discussion of the state-of-charge graph much earlier in this thread). The so-called recovery of battery energy, that was talked about even in Broder's original article (yet in apparently failed attempts to do so in a useful way, that would be without losing the energy again), is not a physical process of recovering lost energy out of nowhere, it is merely the re-adjustment of the estimate made by the software (and/or how the battery charge is measured).
The context which Taylor Owen lacks here is knowledge of the Model S, causing him to misinterpret (or believe) the article, and take something as "one clear reality", whereas as far as understanding here on the forum goes, the actual loss would have been (likely) *much* smaller than first assumed, if the actions in the morning had been not as wasteful in this regard.
So in the end, Taylor Owen's article itself appears to be strongly unbalanced, to Tesla's disadvantage, yet even then, the NYT article quotes the most anti-Tesla statement made in it, actually a quite exceptional statement in the context of what else Taylor Owen wrote in his article.
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I didn't think Broder intentionally tried to fail, but I thought he didn't exercise common sense. Tesla had good reason to be critical of the article, but Elon's calling it a "fake" was unjustified.
Don't get hung up on that one word. In Broder's claim to have set the cruise control on 54 mph, and later to have driven 45 mph, and in his false reporting of how he set the climate control, where do you think these numbers came from? Why did he always (or mostly?) err in the same direction? A victim of his own bias?
