Slashdot Mirror
Who Controls The Linux Media ?
Paul Emms asks "I run LinuxLinks.com - a Linux portal and recently we added a personalised calendar service to our Web site. We submitted an article to LinuxToday (owned by internet.com) and it was published only to be pulled almost immediately. The reason given was that Web site enhancements are no longer news. But wait a minute, this sort of thing has made the news before. LinuxStart announced a similar calendar service, and who owns LinuxStart? Why internet.com of course." You have to admit, that's a pretty good reason to start asking questions...
"This opens up a number of questions about how we judge the news we read. Linux is becoming big business and there are vested interests. Web sites are merging and being taken over by large conglomerates. Who determines the impartiality of the news we read ? Who determines what is news and what is advertising ?
LinuxToday is one of the major daily Linux newsites and they determine that enhancements to major Linux Web sites like LinuxLinks is not important. But LinuxLinks is independent - it
isn't owned by internet.com and it isn't owned by VA Linux. Is it, and sites like it, being penalised because they don't have a monopoly in the Linux media ? And is this really in the spirit of the Linux movement ?
Paul Emms
pwe@firstlinux.com"
What he's really talking about is business motivted censorship. If a media controlled site posts a similar announcement about their own site, but deliberately yanks his, then there is a serious problem. It would be the same if Slashdot deleted all references to http://www.kuro5hin.org/ from postings here. Kinda the same tactics that the boys in Redmond use. So don't blow the guy off - let's see if his claim has validity and if it does, encourage internet.com to behave better.
What if the Hokey Pokey _is_ what it's all about?
So, the latest "web site calendar" story was deemed to not be news any more.
You then moan that a similar story had been published before.
Yes. In July. LAST YEAR.
A year ago, such things may have been news. They certainly aren't now.
If the "rival" story had been published in the same month, in replacement to yours, then you'd have a point. You don't have one *at all* in this situation.
Dan Gillmor has been addressing the question of trust in his weblog over the past couple of days. Of what I have read there, one thing in particular seems to ring true. When information is disseminated by or on behalf of a corporation, it seems to go through a corporate amorality filter. After it has been through this process, it will only contain that aspect of the overall picture which the corporation wishes to present. In the case of this particular complaint, the filter may have judged, "this kind of thing is not newsworthy in its own right, and it does not promote our own ends: therefore it is rejected." Is it too cynical to suppose that self-interest plays a part in the filtering process of an amoral corporation?
In many cases, the truthfulness of the filtered information is not a big issue. Indeed, the corporate amorality filter does not really have a clear concept of true and false, but of spin. Everything is phrased so that it has the right spin. Certainly the filter shies clear of stuff that might get them embroiled in litigation for slander, libel, or defamation (etc), but the simplistic concepts of true and false don't really factor into the equation. When Microsoft claims that its innovation is good for the industry and consumers, there's nothing in that statement which they can get into legal trouble over, and hence no reason not to make the statement, given that it is the view they wish to present. Whether or not it is true by any measure is not the issue: the point is that it's a legally allowable statement that they wish to be perceived as true.
So what do you do? You get cynical, but not too cynical. You have to assume that all the information you get has gone through some kind of filter. Even when Slashdot wasn't a corporate entity, all the information still went through the Taco Filter. You have to make allowances for where the information is coming from. In a very few cases, you will find people that have a dedication to frank and open honesty -- people who do have a notion of true and false instead of just spin, and these are valuable. You still have to take the filter into account, but to a substantially smaller degree.
So where can the Linux community get its news from? The simple answer is that we always need more than one source, simply so we can average out the effect of the various filters. Slashdot, for example, gives me a fairly rich range of stories to pick from, but I know for sure (based on the submissions that I've had rejected) that its filter is not ideal to my needs. And Slashdot does seem to have the advantage of an open comment system that, although noisy, doesn't seem to have been abused by thems that could do so if they wanted to.
Short version: the price of reliable news is eternal vigilance.
proof, n. A demonstration that a conclusion is implied by certain premises and axioms.
obDisclaimer: I don't represent internet.com or LinuxToday. Anyone who says I tried is full of it.
I post to LinuxToday on a daily basis (my user name is "mhall"), and I write for LinuxPlanet (you can also l ook at my article history. My status in both relationships is that of a freelancer ("independent contractor").
There is a policy against announcing new site launches. I don't know when it was enacted because I'm fairly new to LinuxToday. I can say, however, that we routinely reject new site announcements. If one gets posted, it was a mistake.
There's another side of the coin, though, and one which the person posting the initial question could have followed: part of the LinuxToday "family" is the site LinuxPR, which allows anyone with a Linux-related business or site to join at no cost.
By signing up for LinuxPR, anyone posting a Linux-related press release (new product announcement, conference, or, most important to this case, site launch) gets their press release posted not only on the main page of LinuxPR, but on the front page of LinuxToday. Press releases are posted on a frequent basis as we're able. My own personal habit is to look in on the press releases several times an hour while I'm posting stories. I even take the step of correcting bad URL's and cleaning up some of the more egregious grammar problems.
Second, sites doing more than just announcing their existence are always welcome to use the LinuxToday contribute form.
Spend a few minutes looking at LinuxToday, please. Where do the stories come from? They come from other sites. How much of each story do we carry before pointing the reader to the rest of it? Seldom more than three or four paragraphs. When we have a reciprocal agreement with an organization like VNUNet or when the story is run by another internet.com site that isn't in the Linux channel we'll run the whole thing (which, when you think about it, is actually limiting the number of banners the internet.com site is going to move.) If anything, LinuxToday provides a means by which some smaller Linux-related sites can get more traffic than they might have before we thoughtfully provided a link to their story along with a few paragraphs of "teaser" to get the reader's curiosity up.
If LinuxToday were following an "anti-other-Linux-sites" policy, it would soon dry up and blow away. The strength of the site is the near-constant flow of news from around (and outside) the Linux community.
Finally, (and because this is the part most people will feel the most comfortable ignoring, because I'm talking about my client):
Despite several months of working on LinuxToday, I have never felt particularly "watched over" by internet.com. The other editors on the site and its primary programmer are all Linux enthusiasts who are interested in providing a good service to the Linux community. I've never knowingly withheld a story for any reason other than the fact we've already covered it ad nauseum or that it should be submitted as a press release because it's nothing more than an attempt to sell something (including eyeballs).
When I first threw in my lot with LinuxToday and LinuxPlanet, I had some concerns about the nature of the entity that owned them. My own roots in Linux go back over four years, and I've been a UNIX enthusiast for more than twice that time. I've contributed documentation to a major open free software product under the copyleft. I love Linux, and I love the community surrounding it. I get up each day at 6 a.m. to start posting on LinuxToday, and my thoughts are not to how well the money's flowing that day, but how much information is being moved to readers. When I set fingers to keyboard for a story on LinuxPlanet, it isn't because I'm thrilled at the prospect of creating revenue, it's because I hope I can help people make decisions, or inform them in some way. The people I work with (who are in a more durable relationship with internet.com than I) have shown the same instincts and concern for the Linux community.
There may be a site worthy of paranoia and suspicion, but I don't think LinuxToday is it.
Though it should not require reiteration, I'll note once more that I don't speak for any of the entities mentioned in this post besides myself. I'm just a freelancer.
Kind regards,
Michael
------------
Michael Hall
Charlottesville, Virginia
Michael Hall
mph.puddingbowl.org
From the Simpson's Stonecutter episode,
As sung by Rob Malda, CmdrTaco, and Hemos:
o/~ Who controls the linux media
Who keeps BSD down
We do! We do.
Who keeps sensibility off the maps
Who keeps the Mach under wraps
We do! We do.
Who holds back the Metallica's Lars
Who makes Jon Katz a star?
We do! We do.
Who robs geeks of their sight?
Who rigs every Linux-media event?
WE DO! WE DOOO.
o/~
-Gwizdak.