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Microsoft Spinning Against OpenDocument Via Fox News
srwalter writes "As previously reported, Fox News previously ran an article by James Prendergast criticizing Massachussetts for switching to OpenDocument format. Today, Fox News has distanced itself from that article significantly. In a new front page story they post several emails in defense of Massachussetts and OpenDocument in general, as well as apologize for not acknowledging that Prendergast's organization is funded by Microsoft."
Good for them. For once they truly seem fair and balanced.
Hot Damn! It's the Soggy Bottom Boys!
Fair *and* Balanced.
"Rocky Rococo, at your cervix!"
Why is this in the politics section? Genuinely curious.
For the record, all my liberal friends tell me constantly that Fox News is oh-so-biased and CNN is oh-so-great, without EVER citing a single example for either case. It's just become conventional wisdom for them without question.
Heck, one could make the case that Slashdot is extremely biased and inaccurate every day.
"Sufferin' succotash."
Use openoffice 2 beta, and under save as choose ".doc" its funny how oftenly stupid government is about such things.
Today during a recent survey funded by Micro$oft. Playstation 3 will give you brain tumors, and Nintendo Revolution gives you Cancer.
"FUD"?
:D
"Microsoft has a long and well-documented history of not supporting standards."?
"embrace and extend practice"?
O.O OH boy, those ARE slashdotters' comments!
Guys, we're on FOXnews!
...FoxNews is reporting both sides of the story. It really does not matter why they would voice one opinion and then change it at a later date. All that really matters is that both views were reported. :)
oh wait... I do know. Because you have drunk the liberal MSM anti-FoxNews kool-aid and are busily jerking your knees in response to anything labeled "Fox News".
"from the strangest-thing-you'll-see-lately dept."?? Could you be any more self-importantly snide?
When is the last time you saw CNN, the New York Times, or CBS news print this many well-articulated reader responses to an article? Then own up to the author's bias and assert they made a mistake by not making it apparent?
Let me think, now. Ummmm..... NEVER???
If someone runs an article with a title "Massachusetts Should Close Down OpenDocument" (which is a rather one-sided title) then I feel the correcting article should have a title like "Everyone should drop Microsoft"
While I agree that a government is not equal to a role model, saying that the OpenDocument standard is virtually ignored by the constituents of Massachusetts is ill-informed. Many of the individual communities in Massachusetts made the switch in advance of the Commonwealth itself; Saugus is probably the best example as it probably made the switch first and has a lot of info online:
There's more info buried within the various Saugus sites, too. This isn't a change decreed from on-high, it's got quite a bit of grassroots support as well.
They're not customers. Most everyone the state deals with wants something for free or wants to sell them something. They can use the format the state specifies or take a hike.
When the project required changes to our customers' standards, by State Decree, the costs ballooned.
It's a one-time cost. After the conversion is complete, everyone will save money because they can buy tools to work on documents on the free market, not from a single-source vendor.
Great for FoxNews to do this. But, this is not a front page story -- this is a story that has a link from the front page, which has the equivalent of a selective Table of Contents.
:). They don't even call it a correction.
I love the editor's note down at the bottom of the column -- they bury their corrections as well as print papers do
Also, in mentioning the founders of ATL, they don't mention that Citizens Against Government Waste is not a citizens' group -- it is an industry-funded group.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
So, if the state chooses to install OOo Writer, they can read and output not only the Open Document format, but all the legacy documents written in MSWord. For $0 per workstation. Seems like a no-brainer to this MA resident.
In this case, it would appear that someone in Massachusetts state government is trying to do the "right thing".
For another example of someone in MA state government with a clue, surf on over to http://www.mass.gov/mgis/mapping.htm and check out the free online mapping resources. I can't believe it. Usually you have to pay through the nose for current high resolution geo-referenced aerial photography. Here, MA has put it all online for free. Nice going!
PDF is the format for communication with the public.
AFAIK, PDF is well supported, and the number ONE format for document interchange.
Oh, you mean vendors/interdeparment stuff/contractors?
Well, you're working of the state. Guess what; you play by their rules.
The state will interact with its consitutents, the public, in an extremely well supported format.
The state will handle its own affairs in an open format, so that these constituents will have access to the end of time. It's a record keep issue, and its done for their benefit.
Also, consider that you have to change formats anyways. It's either MS XML or OpenDocument XML.
OpenDocument is the better choice for a government.
dada21.... hmm... suspiscious, I suspect you of being a troll.
WhiteWolf666 an exBush supporter. All you new-school,compassionate,save the children Republicans can rot in hell
"Seem" being the operative word. It's more like they got caught. Are you going to tell me with a straight face that Fox News didn't do the slightest checking on the guy's background? That editors were so incompetent, they did not check for conflicts of interest so simple they can be summed up in one line? Please. Even at Fox News, these people are professional journalists and editors. I don't buy the "whoops, silly us" excuse...the amount of incompetence required would be staggering. Sorry, this was willfull.
Worse, they were caught doing something their audience wouldn't really stand for; a corporate scandal. Call me crazy, but if Fox reported John Kerry was a space alien during the election and then it was later "discovered" that the source was a republican party staffer- Fox would do little more than shrug, because half their audience wouldn't care, and the other half would still think Kerry was an alien.
Please help metamoderate.
If you're using these numbers to do anything important, you're insane.
If religous zealots don't believe in Evolution, then why are they so worried about bird flu?
The message FoxNews reprinted, from "Bob Halloran of Jacksonville, Fla", in their article, is a perfect example of how Slashdotters should reply to bad articles ourselves. It's strongly worded, but not hostile. Every sentence contains a fact or direct logical point. The counterexamples aren't sweeping worldview declarations, but clear alternatives that speak for themselves. The points are easily quotable by the editor in a followup article. It's brief.
;).
In short, Halloran's message makes it easy for the editor, and a followup reporter, to change their story. It doesn't require FoxNews to change anything else, or admit anything else (like the unprofessional journalism that saw the original astroturf article published). We rant among ourselves here on Slashdot, but when we mix it up with the normals, we must abide by their weasel ways. Because that's what works - for Halloran, for the many FoxNews consumers he's reached, and for us, who he represents (if mildly, and not all of us
--
make install -not war
I emailed them mentioning that the original article was an opinion piece, and really didn't seem to follow the we report, you decide motto.
They actually emailed a non-automated response, and mentioned that the article was in the Views section, which indicated it was like reading an opinion column in the newspaper.
While I'll let Fox slide on that, they really do not do a good job of indicating that the article is an opinion, or that you are in the views section, unless you look at the banner add looking header of the page. I was thinking of emailing them back and mentioning a site design update to further differentiate opinion articles of this type from the usual news propoganda.
--WooooHoooo--
This was a perfect example of a correction and editing. They not only owned up to the mistake, they also included an avalanche of opposing opinion. They noted that the author's connections were not properly identified and have appended a correction to the earlier version of the story.
This is a reader-friendly, no-bones-about-it correction, and the New York Times could actually take a lesson from Fox News on this one.
Of course, the best thing would have been to get it right in the first place.
I'm probably misreading the headline, but it seems to imply Microsoft is somehow doing something here. Spinning the OpenDocument using FOX, for instance. The article doesn't seem to have anything to do with that; even the text of the slashdot summary. Am I grossly misreading something, or what?
Don't think of it as a flame---it's more like an argument that does 3d6 fire damage
There seems to be this assumption that if you're a conservative, than you're in bed with MS and hostile to Linux, Open Source, yada yada.
This is, plainly spoken, bullshit.
Go to a place like FreeRepublic, and you'll find a good deal of Linux advocacy and Microsoft distrust.
The most prominent popular culture conservatives don't run Windows, nor are Microsoft cheerleaders. Rush Limbaugh and Tom Clancy are OSX users, and Clancy is a longtime critic of MS software.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
It would have been just as dishonest to imply (as the slashdot summary appears to) that ATL is solely funded by Microsoft. Listing the other founders was the right thing to do.
Government employees will be exposed to Open Standards formats and likely Open Source software. This will have a spinoff effect in the buying decisions of some govt employees.
Likely, govt contractors, seeking uniformity with their potential employers, will adopt Open Standards in submission of their bids. Again, this will have a multiplier like effect in terms of employess and business associates.
Closed Source advocates are fighting to keep the stopper in genie's bottle.If she gets out the outcome is more likely to be a closed source nightmare.
In Canada there is, if IIRC, a principle of government that requires govt agencies to use the most widely available, least expensive format for it's citizens to interact with govt. There may even be some case law on this. Is it possible legal action could be launched in a effort to force govts to adopt the most open, least expensive venue?
"Academicians are more likely to share each other's toothbrush than each other's nomenclature."
Cohen
People pay to subscribe to this shit at slashdot and to watch Bill Gates spin about making College Appearances....
I forgot to add my commentary. I included that study just to illustrate my point that there is always a contradictory study against what might be accepted conventional wisdom. I'm not arguing that Fox News and Drudge Report are the most centrist. But I will say that I'm not politically biased toward either end, and I do read Drudge Report often, and I always see both pro-Bush and negative Bush stories (the site in fact links to other stories and doesn't write its own except for exclusives). So when someone tells me a site like Drudge Report is "right-wing," I'm curious as to what makes it that and why I'm not seeing it. Then I examine the person making the claims--they are almost always a Democrat, or at least left-leaning on the political spectrum. While it doesn't automatically invalidate their claims or make them not worth examining, it does suggest a reason for such a perception to be made.
I think the real truth is that the people who are always claiming "bias!" of various news media are the fringe left and fringe right, who have the time and energy to be the loudest and make it appear as though their claims are the norm, while we middle-ground people are too busy living our lives to argue with them.
"Sufferin' succotash."
The original piece was not an article, it was not written as a piece of news, but a piece of commentary by a columnist... as specified by the 'Views' header on the top of the page. If you need to understand the differences between a Columnist and a Reporter, click these links. In any case, the liberal fodder against Fox News is once again ablaze with insufficient facts and ignorant assholes. Note: Yes, this is flame, grade it as such. Thank you.
You get your news from somewhere other than TV?
Link
A study by the Program on International Policy Attitudes, in the Winter 2003-2004 issue of Political Science Quarterly, reported that viewers of the Fox Network local affiliates or Fox News were more likely than viewers of other news networks to hold three views which the authors labeled as misperceptions.
67% of FOX viewers believed that the "US has found clear evidence in Iraq that Saddam Hussein was working closely with the al Qaeda terrorist organization" (Compared with 56% for CBS, 49% for NBC, 48% for CNN, 45% for ABC, 16% for both NPR and PBS). However, the belief that "Iraq was directly involved in September 11" was held by 33% of CBS viewers and only 24% of FOX viewers.
33% of FOX viewers believed that the "US has found Iraqi weapons of mass destruction" "since the war ended". (Compared with 23% for CBS, 20% for both CNN and NBC, 19% for ABC and 11% for both NPR and PBS)
35% of FOX viewers believed that "the majority of people [in the world] favour the US having gone to war" with Iraq. (Compared with 28% for CBS, 27% for ABC, 24% for CNN, 20% for NBC, 5% for both NPR and PBS)
Fox viewers were unique in that those who paid greater attention to news were moderately more likely to have these misperceptions than those who paid less or no attention to news.
----------
I had to cut out some of the stats because of the lameness filter
Further proof that there is a direct correlation between the amount of FOX 'News' programming you watch and your level of ignorance. FOX News succeeds in the ratings because it tells people what they want to hear, it does not challenge the mindset of its viewers with facts or differing opinions. It merely presents a proverbial warm cozy blanket of facts blended seamlessly with opinion and outright fabrication.
CNN, CBS, ABC, et al are often accused of downplaying or not reporting stories because they are deathly afraid of losing access to the sources of information that they rely on. In recent years they have moved to emulate their 300lb gorilla competitor by simply swallowing the information they receive from the government and playing along with whatever policy directive has come down from the White House. The remarkable lack of investigative spirit and widespread complacency during the run up to the Iraq War was simply amazing - and utterly gutting - to witness.
None of them, however, have adopted the perfected formula devoid of credibility and objectivity that FOX News has. They are merely wannabes, as FOX has seemingly nailed it down to a science all its own.
Be careful. You just said something positive about FoxNews. Groupthink around here is that FoxNews is in bed with Satan. Waitaminute, groupthink around here holds religion to be bad, too.
At any rate, to go and point out that FoxNews corrected the actual news article in question and took full responsibility while also posting dissenting views flies in the face of all the posts above yours. Never mess with groupthink, man. Groupthink still holds to the belief that conservatives believe Sadam Hussein bombed the WTC. You go and confront groupthink with actual facts and you'll get it all grumpy and everything...
The Splintered Mind - Overcoming
The most important thing that seems to be ignored. Various cities around the country provide "Starter Kits" for their citizens that include such software as Internet Explorer, Outlook Express, etc.
What would stop Massachusets from providing a CD of OpenOffice.org for a minimal fee ($1.75 or something) for all citizens. You want to do business with MA and complain about not having the software to view their documents? Fine, just follow the download link on their website, or simply ask for the CD. This doesn't have to stop to office documents. Their map viewer (which is rather excellent) can also be bundled on the CD (along with data).
Imagine this. Want to open up a new store in MA? Here, grab this CD with maps of our demographics, major roads, excisting facilities. Many cities in Washington state have done something similar, on the web only currently. Then, the required forms are also included in the CD, as well as software to view and edit them. Just print them and bring them over to the closest state office.
Why should the state of Massachusets not do such a thing? Promote business, empower your citizens. Is that so wrong?
> When is the last time you saw CNN,
Yea, they fessed up instantly that Tailwind was a work of fiction and fired the commie bastard responsible for the lie. Oh wait, they didn't. But surely they fired the idiot exec who asserted as a fact that US forces target journalists. Wait, they didn't exactly do that either.
> the New York Times,
Well after four tries over a month or so they finally got a semi-complete correction into print about Paul Krugman's 'creative use of fact' regarding the Florida recounts. But seriously, considering how many times they have been caught lying, distorting, confusing the news and editorial sections and outright printing fiction as news (Jayson Blair ring a bell anymore?) the real question is why their circulation is still over a thousand copies a day.
> or CBS news
Yup, they fired Mapes and Rather the second their treason was uncloaked. Oh, wait they are STILL trying to hide behind the "factually false but we still stand behind the gist of the story' excuse.
> print this many well-articulated reader responses to an article?
Exactly. The got skunked by a Microsoft shill, got called on it by thousands and did the right thing. They put the retraction in basically the same spot on their homepage as the original, picked very good responses to print instead of the raving lunatics and denounced the original author along with stating for the record they should have at least did the background research to spot the PR flack and include that fact in the original story. In short I suspect it will be a while before they fall for this one again.
Democrat delenda est
Actually, the sad thing is, when shifts in something as large as document file formats, the Government almost has to be a role model.
For the past 3 years I have been using OpenOffice.org, and I switched to version 2.0 as soon as the beta was released. Guess how much that impacted the way society, the society I am a member of, views documents? Not at all. But, when a government body offering documents to the public shifts to a different file format, people are forced to change. While this would normally seem bad, this change is in a positive direction. This change brings equality to the table. I cannot afford, nor would I purchase if I could afford, Microsoft Office. On top of that, it does not run on my Operating System. By switching to something that makes electronic documents available to everyone with a computer, we are bringing society one step closer to the government, making the government less of a tryant capable of offering us documents we are entitled to with a large $300 string attached.
Now that they have decided on OpenDocument, any user can use any software that supports it. This is one of the few cases the government being a role model for society is going to benefit everyone (except Microsoft). It will only be a matter of time before OpenDocument format is viewable with a simple browser plugin, and I wouldn't be surprised to see an AJAX powered OpenDocument editor pop up on the web soon either.
I am currently working to change my university to OpenDocument, so we can become a role model to our community. Imagine trying to fill out a form for Financial Aid, or to apply for a job, but having that form require a piece of software that you can't afford. I understand OOo can read .doc files, as can other office suites, but what happens when Microsoft finally gets their patent on their file formats and does not allow 3rd party companies to reverse engineer their filetype? I for one would rather tie myself to a standard offered and accepted to the global community that is freely available to anyone than to tie myself to a format that is offered by a single company that is notorious for suing its customers and requiring new software to view new versions of its documents.
If governmental role models are required to shift us from .doc to .odt, then I welcome it with open arms. But I think we miss the point to say the government is trying to be a role model here, I think they are doing the exact opposite. They have realized they were being a role model, and imposing restrictions on the use of documents that are public domain, and they are now cutting those strings, meaning it is up to us, the end user, to choose what software to use.
If your software doesn't support the new format, then that isn't the government's fault, that is the software manufacturer's fault. Every developer is free to use the OpenDocument standard, including Microsoft. So why don't we yell at Microsoft for trying to be a role model instead?
"Now the trouble about trying to make yourself stupider than you really are is that you very often succeed." -C.S. Lewis
While I like Fox News, and as another poster has already pointed out so well, they are centrist, and not right-biased (except when measured against much of the rest of the mainstream media), the Microsoft affiliation of the opinion columnist should have been pointed out at the top of the article -- not the bottom.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
from the article
Comments made by the IT chief for the state said there would be costs to convert from the current office suite regardless of what was replacing it. The costs to convert to OpenDocument were estimated at $5 million; upgrading the current vendor's product would cost $50 million, both in license fees and upgraded PCs to support the newer product.
I could see a little ballooning in the price being possible, but I don't see it topping the cost for upgrading to the next version of MS Office.
The World's Worst Webcomic!
When Tom DeLay was indicted most big news sites ran a headling saying something to the effect of "DeLay Indicted." FoxNews' website had the slightly different headline that was something like "DeLay says 'Im innocent'". Now both headlines are true, he was indicted and he did claim innocence. The actual event that happened that day, the NEWS, if you will, was that he was indicted. DeLay's claim of innocence is his side of the story. It may seem minor but if you took a few thousand people (who knew nothing about Delay and didn't claim to be liberal or conservative) and showed half of them one headline and half the other and asked them if they thought he was guilty or innocent I'll bet that the people who saw the "I'm innocent" headline would respond more favorably to him than the "Delay Indicted" folks. Words matter.
Foxnews is as right-wing as NPR is left-wing. The only difference is that Foxnews claims to be balanced, which is total bullshit. At least NPR doesn't lie to their listeners about their "fairness".
Fair and balanced.
Really?
There's a brilliant documentry Outfoxed that looks into just how 'fair and balanced' fox is.
Amongst a myriad of damming evidence some of the most startling is probably the internal memo's sent out advising on how to slant coverage to fit the conversative/right-wing agenda.
There's no doubt that they secretly manipulate the news and that in turn they wind up manipulating people's perception of the truth.
I suspect that your complaint with the Times is that they sometimes publish facts that reasonably lead to conclusions contrary to your own. And while it's true that they do select which stories to publish, and that those selections betray editorial bias, that is true of every news outlet (especially FOX). I realize this sort of comment is considered insightful among Dittoheads, but it's just utter nonsense.
Never mess with groupthink, man. Groupthink still holds to the belief that conservatives believe Sadam Hussein bombed the WTC. You go and confront groupthink with actual facts and you'll get it all grumpy and everything...
Facts are funny things.
It may not be the majority anymore, but it's still almost half of Americans (could that be the *conservative* half?), and considering that George W. Bush himself promoted the idea that Hussein was behind the 9/11 attacks, it's no wonder the rest of the country considers conservatives a bit... dim.
From all evidence, it seems conservatives are the fucking *worst* at groupthink. "What's that? Evidence that Iraq is *no threat whatsoever*? Evidence that President Bush fucking *lied* to us? Well, support the troops! And, ah, if you think bad of the President, you're a traitor! And a bed-wetter!"
To paraphrase "Get Fuzzy," do you want to be Pot, or Kettle for Hallowe'en?
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
Julius Caesar - Act I, Scene i: "What mean'st thou by that? Mend me, thou saucy fellow!"
I work for a national news service that "competes" with Fox. There is an understanding that if you work for Murdoch, you have sold out any attempt at integrity for cash. Fox does not deliver news, they deliver opinion (and I'm risking flames here). Their standards are set so low and their "spinners" are part of the report that one cannot truly expect that their material is free enough of bias to allow the viewer or reader to come to any meaningful conclusion.
Fox reports on the national events just like everyone and that is why they are insidious. You'll see coverage of Katrina, of the horrible earthquake in Pakistan and India. You'll see sports scores and weather on the local Fox channels. But the spin cycle is fully on for political coverage and for coverage of big business. At Fox, big corporations can do no wrong and if they make a claim to a Fox reporter, those claims (and all the spin inherent in those claims) are never fact-checked. They're reported as if they were truth. Up until the very end, Fox did no reporting that questioned the accountability of the Enron chiefs, while ABC, CBS, NBC and PBS (yeah, those Commies) reported questionable bookkeeping and deals that were pretty nigh illegal on the surface on their books. Enron was sued by the State of California for artificially raising energy prices to "create a crisis." Fox did not report on those suits. Everyone else did.
Instead, Fox began an attack on then-Governor Gray Davis and how he was incorrectly handling an energy crisis that was probably not of his own making. I believe the Fox television network (at least) was partially responsible for the recall election and the subsequent replacement of Gray Davis with Arnold Schwarzenegger. If the court cases finally decide that this was all Enron's making, I'd have to say that this kind of manipulation is pretty insidious.
Of course, when Enron declared bankruptcy and was called to question, Fox joined the bandwagon and launched "investigative reports." But even now, they hold Kenneth Lay blameless. Why? Because Fox is the "pro-Bush network" and any friend of the Bush family is a friend of Murdoch and his network.
I have read extensively the history of our country, which started off on the premise that the Press should be free. I have read diatribes against our founding fathers, aspersions to the characters of George Washington, Ben Franklin, James Monroe, Mrs. Adams and her "pet President John," and so on. I defend Murdoch's right to broadcast and print opinion. He has a right to do so and he has created a media empire for that purpose.
But understand that what he does with his empire is not necessarily tell you the truth. Almost everything of consequence is spun. And what I find unfortunate is that the other networks and news outlets think that they have to "chase Fox" and be more like them. Which means, increasingly, almost all of the news you receive has bias and spin. Don't believe everything you read in the papers and don't believe most of what you see on television.
This is a report from inside a media giant.
Gods don't kill people, people with gods kill people.