[corresation]

The job of a public editor is wholly to fact check and criticize their own newspaper, which itself lends credibility to both themselves and the paper (because a paper that is its own worse critic seems above reproach). They have no boundary on tearing into their own paper.

However the primary complaint of the editor is effectively that the author used poor judgement in not getting every single detail absolutely right with pinpoint accuracy, particularly in dealing with anything to do with Tesla. They said that they turned the temperature down at a certain point, for instance, giving Musk the ammunition to cry outrage when his own data showed that not much further in the journey the temperature went to the minimum for over 50 miles of the journey (which, at the slow speeds recorded, would have been over an hour). It's things like that which have been the topic of most outage about the NYT article, despite not changing the actual substance of the article whatsoever.