how badly the mainstream media understands spacex
Ha, this tickled me.
It's not a question of spacex. Its a question of the fact that the mainstream media
is entirely and totally scientifically and engineering illiterate.
These people are emotional spin doctors bought and paid for by the highest bidder. Real journalism these days can only be found online, and even then it is rare (this site being an example). Modern big media "journalists", who really shouldn't call themselves journalists, a pretty much the cancer of the western world at this point. They do whatever they are paid the most to do and say, they make crap up, pretty much every single time something happens, and when it doesn't they invent something out of a non-issue, they lie cheat steal and lack any sort of ethics, and they have absolutely no idea how anything mechanical works at all, EVEN WHEN IT'S EXPLAINED TO THEM by the people who work there. They don't understand power-plants, or oil refineries outside of "oh god global warming!" They don't understand physics or nuclear engineering outside of "oh god contamination, super science, a bomb!" They don't understand spaceflight outside of "Oh look rocket EXPLODED, HEY GUYYYYS LOOK LOOK IT EXPLODDDEEED OMG" and so forth.
The thing that irks me the most from the past few days is every major paper, news service, and more all reported this with bright big headlines "Spacex rocket EXPLODED!!! HUGE SETBACK CONGRESS CUTTING MONEIES", yet when huge milestone missions occur, or money is cut for mars, OR during the CXP debacle in 2011, not a god damn peep. Not one word. Nothing.
Because you see idiocy and misinformation, disinformation, this is what sells in 2015, not the truth, not facts, not reality. A fantasy crafted by infantile minds, for infantile minds, of infantile minds. And/or a fantasy designed to prey on un-educated people, of which there are many particularly in the U.S. right now where apparently "gender studies" and things like that are more popular than basic mechanical engineering.
And that in a nutshell, is why I hate the media, especially in the U.S. If they all went off the air and stopped printing papers tomorrow we would be better off. God only knows.
So the moral here is ignore them, boycott them, and don't read their crap, because it is just that:
crap.
They have no idea what they are talking about, they never do, they never will. That is all there is to it.
It is not a question of "bad pr" or "bad press" it is a question of the press itself being a giant steaming pile. There is no such thing as good pr anymore. SpaceX will be fine as you can see, their satellite partners are not leaving them, nor is NASA cutting their contracts. I wouldn't worry. Worry instead about Congress who to often seems to be at the whim of media astro-turfing and ends up cutting funding to things as a result. Because federal subsidies for gender studies undergrads is more important than you know, colonizing other planets. Oops did I say that? Oh well.
/end rant