[rotflmao]

This. Make some company out to be the boogeyman du jour, then tell that lie often enough until most people believe it and it has spread all the way around the world with no chance of the truth catching up. It's bullshit, and I'm amazed that so many HNers that typically express healthy skepticism fall for it.

[kbenson]

While I agree there is a bias in the media regarding Uber, that didn't form in a vacuum. There have been numerous fairly bad missteps from the company. I think it's less a case of the media steering the public as is is the media conforming to public opinion in some cases and showing the public what it expects, since the public is getting a fairly bad impression of Uber, and that's not entirely because of how the media has presented the stories.

[techinformed56]

Fair enough! But what do you say of this article in NYT today on this ruling? https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/15/technology/uber-self-driv...

Selectively quoting only stuff about Engineer and not quoting anything on actual injunction (which is a win for uber) seems like steering towards a negative narrative against Uber.

Again we can dislike Uber's policies etc. But journalist also needs to lay out facts as they are. Not actually try to steer the argument in one direction.

[kbenson]

> Selectively quoting only stuff about Engineer and not quoting anything on actual injunction (which is a win for uber) seems like steering towards a negative narrative against Uber.

In my opinion, calling any of this a win for Uber is a bit of a stretch. If there were no court case, Uber would be entirely unrestricted. Waymo asked for a lot of restrictions, and was granted relatively little. That's better than it could have been for Uber, but still not as good as no injunctions. It's a "win" in the same way that if someone mugged me and only took my inexpensive watch instead of my wallet and smartphone I would have "won". Sure, it could have been worse, but calling it a win seems odd to me. It only makes sense when you narrow your scope to the battle, instead of the war, and to my eyes puts it in the realm of propaganda. I much prefer "good for Uber" or "bad for Uber" or "better than widely expected".

That said, it doesn't change my earlier point at all. If at this point the public is very receptive to and feeds off more evidence of Uber's wrongdoing, then playing to that by the media is to be expected (if still to be condemned). Uber, because of its entire business model is based on disruption that different people see as extremely positive or extremely negative, likely never had a chance at being represented in an unbiased way. In the beginning, that bias probably went both ways. As time has gone on, there's been more negative news to feed to the the thresher than positive, and at this point it's a feedback loop.