Again, should be true but often simply doesn't play out that way in practice. The stockholders may be very diffuse groups of people, or mostly represented by proxies (eg fund managers) that don't have any real incentive or ability to organize a counternarrative and counterdrive to counteract concerted, well organized shorting, with all that entails in terms of media FUD etc etc.

Hell, even in cases where long oriented speculators really do bite back, and in even in the fraction of those cases where they're able to have any success, they still get ridiculed in the media and in the industry.