As everyone probably all knows, SpaceX just launched their second Starship/Super Heavy rocket. It successfully lifted off the pad and the stages separated before Starship self terminated due to some as of yet undisclosed problem. (The current speculation as of this post is that there was an O2 tank leak that caused lower than planned thrust and it self-deleted when the computer determined that it could not achieve its preprogrammed flight path.) SpaceX's own goal was to get to stage separation and not wreck the pad in the process, and this rocket met that goal. Of course, the mainstream media rushed to publish headlines like Bloomberg's “SpaceX Starship and Super Heavy Booster Launch and Failure.” (You can see that Bloomberg changed the headline at least once but sadly the original hater headline wasn't captured.)

Ars's Eric Berger (who's probably the last journalist worth reading on that site) penned an article in direct response to all of the haters titled "Sorry, doubters: Starship actually had a remarkably successful flight" (archive). Most of the article talks about why the test was a success and at the end of the article he touches on the elephant in the room, that most of the negative coverage of SpaceX is directly because of people's hate of Musk himself. I will criticize Berger and the article here because he leaves out that the true motivation of the haters in both the media and in general is their hatred of Musk's politics.

So of course the leftists had to fight it out in the comments section. Some going with the "you can hate the artist and like the art stance" while others went with the tried and true "Musk is a white supremacist nazi" route. So Berger himself commented in response to one of the critics bemoaning the fact that he doesn't have a full hate boner for Musk by saying this:

So you may feel that he is a piece of shit. A lot of people do. But not everyone does. A lot of people think Donald Trump is a piece of shit. Should every article about him say he's a piece of shit? What about Joe Biden? I find some of Musk's comments reprehensible. But I don't view it as my job to apply my full judgmental value to them in a news article about a rocket launch. I do feel it was important to acknowledge their existence, and so I did.

(Link, Archive) My reaction to that is that Berger is still operating on normie tier politics and doesn't get that leftists demand 100% ideological purity and to suggest that Musk isn't 100% evil or that Biden might be a piece of shit will make them hate him. The pearl clutching over some of Musk's comments and Trump-hate is also indicative of normie level politics.

Having said all that, its refreshing to see a journalist not want to insert leftist ideology into their work. It's also nice seeing a journalist push back on the MSM narrative, especially on Ars of all places.