Slashdot Mirror
Are Media Writers Biased Towards Apple?
Art Vanderlay writes "Readers should not be surprised by overcoverage of Apple Computers since the tech writers and columnists for the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, and Fortune are all Mac users. According to John Dvorak of PC Mag, no one seems to point out the connection between the skewed coverage and the existence of this peculiar conflict of interest based on the national writers' use of Macs. He feels the newsroom editors are generally so out of touch that they can't see this bias and are also Mac users." From the article: "This reality is not going to change. In fact it will only get worse as technology coverage is handed to newer, less-qualified observers who simply cannot use a Microsoft Windows computer. With no Microsoft-centric frame of reference, Microsoft cannot look good. The company essentially brought this on itself with various PR and marketing policies that discouraged knowledgeable coverage. I'll save those complaints for a future gripe session."
In fact it will only get worse as technology coverage is handed to newer, less-qualified observers who simply cannot use a Microsoft Windows computer.
As opposed to the current "qualified" observers who cannot be bothered to use anything besides a Windows computer? Maybe like you, John, who admitted that you didn't understand Creative Commons, and therefore it must be worthless. Or saying that large hard drive storage only serves as a replacement for the VCR. Or that the PC has become bland, boring, useless? Maybe it has, if your nose is stuck up the ass of Microsoft.
If it's anything different from the current "Microsoft can do no wrong" mainstream press, I'm all for it. The real question should be can PC Magazine survive?
The World is Yours.
I'm sure I'll be modded into oblivion for saying it, but come ON. Even (especially?) Slashdot is guilty of this.
It's all iPod, all the time here. Apple released a "video iPod" and everyone hails it as genius--conveniently ignoring the Archos and the new Neuros video player that were out long before this.
And I'm not talking just announcements, either--it's also about continuing coverage. Did anyone dissect the Neuros 442 to see how it ticks? What about the Archos? Heck, even iAudio has their own combined video player/audio player but when did you hear about it in ANY media? But Apple hitches up to the bandwagon and suddenly it's news.
It's grossly unfair as well. The market is already falling to Apple solely based on hype. I personally love Neuros but I fear for their long term survival because of this. They have a great product, they're very open source friendly (something that should have endeared them around Slashdot, but it hasn't...they're just not COOL like Apple I guess, despite releasing the code to the FIRMWARE of their players no less). But they get no coverage at all. None. The Neuros 3 is in development and they are openly ASKING their customers what they want--heck, Joe Borne even participates on their forums. Every ONE of you OGG fanatics should be over there, because they're quite happy to oblige you.
Bias? Hell yes. Unless it's Apple, it's not news. But kudos to Slashdot for at least daring to ask the question of overexposure.
Bzzzzt Wrong!
Before the iPod Apple made a stir with OS X, which was certainly not just some stylized rehash of any PC stuff. Before OS X (and even through today... well yesterday at least) Apple made a splash with the iMac which (while certainly done with a great deal of style) redefined what a consumer friendly computer could be (Easy to set up, easy to use (relatively), and will look good at home where people tend to care about those things).
The truth is since Steve returned with his NeXt compatriots Apple's been churning out lot of fantastic new products. Have you looked a Aperture which Apple announced yesterday? That product (unless there's some serious hidden bug in there somewhere) will totally rock the digital photography world. It's exactly the type of tool that everyones wanted and nobody made... Photoshop was resting on it market place domination and everyone else was trying to copy Photoshop.
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I worked in journalism for 10 years. Maybe the percentage of Macs around was a bit higher than you'd find in the general business population, but not by much. Most media companies have large LANs full of Windows boxes. Sorry, but the offices of the New York Times and Time magazine aren't some Mac utopia where there's a Mac on every desk. There's a Dell on every desk. And most of the laptops are Thinkpads or Dells.
This is just Dvorak being a nut again.
Synopsys, Cadence, and Magma do not make Windows software, it's all for Linux/Solaris. As a Desktop machine, Mac OS X seemlessly integrates into that kind of an environment where you need X11, Terminals, and your favorite text editor (vi/emacs).
Anyway, I won't pretend to know what most "tech writers" know. But I do know that Dvorak is nothing but a troll, and writes whatever gets him page hits and lots of flames. That's what pays his bills. He's full of shit, to be completely frank, and claiming that Mac users are incompetent because they don't use Windows is so far beyond stupid that this guy would have received a million death senetnces if stupidity was punishable by death.
Clever signature text goes here.
Microsoft sold all the shares in Apple years ago (and made quite the profit mind you)
I will concede the point about OSX even if i don't agree with it, as making an unix environment friendly for the desktop user is a first. Not to mention convincing the GUI-worshipping macOS users to get down on an unix shell.
But, what about the newton? what about the laser printer and desktop publishing? Things that came almost out of nowhere and were pioneered by Apple.
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Hardly.
Just because people use the products or are even advocates of it doesnt mean they are bias in their work.
Likely DJ is upset at his major predictions being wrong and wants to blame someone besides himself. In the same way people blame the the liberal/conservative media when it suits them.
members are seeing something, your seeing an ad
over 500 million purchases (not including the free songs given away via pepsi promotions) argue that many people wouldn't mind "paying $.99 for poor quality DRM'd music." the fact is, lots of people do not care about DRM or the "quality" issues. they prefer legally buying just one song instead of one song and a lot of filler. the rest of your arguement shows perhaps why the ipod isn't meant for you and that's why you don't get the "hype" behind all of it.
hackers of the world unite!
No, technically it's a stylised rehash of Openstep which was a stylised rehash of Nextstep which was a stylised rehash of... well... nothing. Nextstep used a BSD Unix base combined with Carnegie Mellon's Mach microkernel, and used a completely unique object oriented development environment with a lot of other pioneering technology to make something which couldn't really have it's lineage traced back to any operating system that existed before it.
If you want to get really technical, Mac OS X's relationship to BSD is that it runs a server on the XNU microkernel that creates a BSD-like environment for applications, it's not really even fair to say that OS X is based on BSD, let alone a stylised rehash of it. It has just taken elements from BSD and incorporated them into the operating system.
Those who know a lot about technology build their own machines and, nowadays, are putting GNU/Linux and other free software OSes on them.
I'm an experienced tech journalist too, and before OS X, yeah, I was all about building my own white boxes, and sticking Linux on them. But then along came OS X, and I mostly stopped doing that because, after all, I'm getting paid to be a writer, not be a sys-admin, and OS X Just Works in a way that Linux doesn't. Plus it'll run a native version of Microsoft Word alongside, say, Konqueror.
Apple computers have never been geared toward the tech savvy; they have always been marketed to the artistic technophobe.
OS X unix roots make it a great machine for the tech savvy, and its increasingly being adopted as such -- if you don't believe me, visit, say, JPL and look at what its space/engineering geeks are using: lots and lots of powerbooks.
But unless they write for an Apple-centric pub, tech journalists do not usually use Macs, especially the most tech-savvy of the lot.
Maybe we live in different parts of the country, because most of the science/tech journalists I know in NYC use Macs.
"Just once, I'd like to meet an alien menace that wasn't immune to bullets." -- The Brigadier, Dr. Who
A decade ago, about one decade after the launch of the Macintosh, virtually EVERY mention of Apple by the press attached the adjective "beleaguered" to the word "Apple." It was as if the press had universally decided to change the name of the company to "Beleaguered Apple Computer Inc." They spoke in glowing terms about such industry darlings as Gateway and Compaq. (heh) Mr. Dvorak, who spent a stint as a columnist at MacUser magazine in the Mac's first peak years ('88-'94), followed the herd and became the tech journalism's leading Apple-basher. He, more than any other industry pundit took it to the logical extreme and repeatedly pronounced Apple dead. Or near dead. Or almost nearly kind of dead. Over, and over and over again.
Now, Jobs has managed to turn Apple around, and make it into an industry leader once again. Mr. Dvorak's favorite monopolists have become the General Motors of the tech industry (read: bland, predictable, flawed, and boring - producing pablum with zero innovation or appeal.) The herd is all flocking to Apple now. Big deal.
Now Dvorak has stopped writing anything particularly useful, and his just become a industry gadfly; saying stupid things to piss people off. He hasn't stopped beating this anti-Apple drum for the past 10 years. Why? It gets him attention. That is all. He has decided to just be a black sheep. Same herd, just a different coat. Just because.
The thing that is odd, is that in some ways he was right. Apple is dead. The old, Performa/Quadra/Michael Spindler/John Sculley/Pink/Taligent/Copland Apple is dead. The Apple of today is nothing like the Apple of a decade ago. Nothing. Thank Jobs.
The technology journalists aren't "biased" they are just praising a set of quality products from a quality company. The fact that they actually USE the products isn't a bias, it just is.
--chuck
I see good ol' John Dvorak has changed is tune over the years... Anyone remember that Apple should be dead by now? (How many times has he predicted it?) Now he is lamenting that there are large portions of the computer using population who have no Microsoft Windows experience? My, my, how times have changed.
Actually, it's a common misconception that John C. Dvorak was the creator of the Dvorak keyboard. The Dvorak keyboard layout was actually invented in the 1930s by August Dvorak, an educational psychologist and distant relation to the composer Antonin Dvorak.