The claim is that PP's economy of words meant that the presentations to each level of management got more and more dismissive of the danger, the higher up the chain they went. Euphemisms got more and more bland, until the top people thought "screw it, we're launching."
Note that I'm not endorsing that theory, since I haven't seen the slide decks that got used. It's disputed here: https://eagereyes.org/criticism/tufte-and-the-truth-about-th...
I find that dismissal to be completely missing the point. Tufte wasn't arguing physics, he was arguing that PP euphemisms caused top execs to minimize the danger.
I can imagine him blaming a presentation style, but PowerPoint?
The Challenger exploded in 1986: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_Challenger_disas...
PowerPoint didn't exist until 1987: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_PowerPoint
Tufte decrying PowerPoint in relation to a shuttle disaster was about about the Columbia, not the Challenger.
This isn't true actually. From the very start the o-rings were not functioning as designed even in warm weather. They realized even before the first shuttle launch that the o-rings weren't compressed properly and were being partially extruded through the SRB joints when fired, and allowed some gas to escape out the joint around the o-ring, causing partial o-ring erosion. NASA decided not to worry about it and continue with the design. Turns out this problem was even worse during cold weather...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_Challenger_disas...
However having o-rings that are this fragile was a large part of the problem with shuttle. It was fragile, to get it to be able to launch at all an increasing amount of issues had to be ignored. To many failure points, leading to far to many close calls.
What is actually surprising is that only 2 shuttles failed.
Wow, they invented that phrase? I had no idea.