I'm also trying to understand. The agenda is to publish about Trump and Elon? Is that correct?

The agenda is to highlight when Trump and Elon blunder but ignore neutral or positive stories. Go to the front page right now and look at the articles, I see four mentioning Trump that are negatively charged. That isn't to say any one article is untrue, but hard to miss the curated pattern

Honest question: has he done anything you think warrants good press?

I too quickly grew tired of the constant doomerism in his first term, but this one seems to be unmitigatedly terrible.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/08/trump-admin-says...

This is the only thing that comes to mind, and Ars covered it.

Apart from articles by the two space reporters, any news about Musk tend to be biased towards being extremely negative.

Aside from SpaceX, has there been any positive news about Musk lately?

Gitlin, at least, also slants the negative news. The story on sales about Tesla losing market share to VW, but other outlets reported it as VW gaining the top spot.

They've always had more coverage of Tesla than other automakers, or at least I've always noticed it more. When Tesla was leading EV sales they dutifully reported that, when they're dropping they report it just as well. If anything slanted coverage would be reporting less on Tesla because they are doing badly, which seems to be what you want.

Would that excuse being extremely negative about anything that is much less than extremely negative?

That is an incredibly tortured sentence. I'm not really interested in parsing tone in an article, that's very subjective. I would be interested if you could demonstrate that Ars was choosing not to write articles about factual things that would portray Musk in a positive light, but you instead basically said "If you ignore all of their positive factual coverage, they don't publish anything positive about Musk at all!"

I have said that they have a strong negative bias. Whether the underlying news is positive or negative is completely irrelevant. Relevant is that they make things much more negative (= less positive) than they are.

Nothing Trump or his administration has done warrants good press.