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."
I would like to use this opportunity to humbly request a new Article filter - a John Dvorak Filter. There's no reason to give this hack a moment of my time.
More than that, writers need to sell stories, and Apple has interesting things to write about. How many people give a shit if Dell brings out a new product?
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
I'd like to consider myself very technically astute given my educational background and career as an electrical engineer, and after buying an iMac G5 (first mac unless you count my folks' IIe clone back in the Elementary school days) I loved it so much I replaced my Compaq notebook with a Powerbook a few months later. Let's not confuse ease of use with power, especially considering under Apple's pretty face lies a powerful Unix subsystem. I'll say it again: OS X is what Linux on the Desktop aspires to be.
I don't know how pro-PC Dvorak is. He's said (at least recently) that he thinks Microsoft is "dead in the water" because they haven't released anything useful in a long time. He's also said that he thinks Apple is doing a great job and that their marketshare is going to grow exponentially.
Albuquerque PC
Dvorak's comments make sense to me. Apple is the flashy, style, radical, celebrity, hype, media focus's tech company, and the meticulously cultivate that image. Microsoft is the grey cubicle, work 60 hours a week, flyover country tech company. I associate Apple with "looking cool", and the PC world with "work". Its probably because I have had PC's at almost every job I've hard. We've all had jobs with aging, nasty, dustbunny PCs performing some menial function. You rarely if ever see Mac's in that role unless you are in the publishing/marketing world.
But how much of the writing is actually done on a Mac? Now, it may be that conventional journalists may use Macs more often than not, but I suspect most freelancers are using Windows systems. Or even Linux. And producing Microsoft Word documents more than likely. Almost everyone I've written for accepts Word documents, for many it's the preferred (often the only) format.
a) You can get Word (and nearly the entire Office suite) as an OS X application. Microsoft has, after all, been writing software for Apple longer than its been writing software for MS Windows.
b) As a journalist, I can tell you anecdotely that the proportion of reporters I see at conferences, etc., who use Macs versus those on PCs is much higher than in the general population.
c) In a lot of places the layout/design production end is at least partially integrated with the editorial end, so that articles can go into a system as manuscripts (i.e. Word documents), have a few rounds of edits and get laid out all in one tracking system. This also allows editors to do screen edits: i.e. we can't change any of the graphical elements, but we can still edit text ourselves even after its been laid out in something like Quark. This is great when you have to do someting like shorten an article by 5 lines to make it fit the available space: it's something only an editor can do, and it saves having to have us stand over the shoulder of a layour person.
"Just once, I'd like to meet an alien menace that wasn't immune to bullets." -- The Brigadier, Dr. Who
Considering the source, so what? Dvorak does nothing but trash Apple. Everyone of his articles is Microsoft slanted. He's basically a MS Fanboy who probably gets paid well on the side by MS to say nice things.
After years of Dvorak's predictions of doom and gloom about the demise of beleagured Apple, he's probably just pissed that his predictions weren't only wrong, but that Apple's enjoying some success. So he does what everyone else does--blame it on the media.
go Astros!
I might know what I'm talkin' about, but then again, this is Slashdot...
Oh what utter bullshit. I just recently got my Master's in Computer Science and I wouldn't be surprised if a majority of both grad students and professors were enthusiastic about Macs and OS X. While going to school I had an assistantship helping out doing software development for the Imaging Science department. The software was targeted to run on many flavors of UNIX: Linux, Solaris, Irix (I think they still supported this) and OS X. You know what many of the grad students, developers and System Admins worked with and talked a lot about with admiration? You guessed it... OS X. I've lost count how many times I've been on Slashdot and heard engineers with a lot of experience using computers to get their work done - not technical idiots at all - saying how productive they were working with Macs.
I'm sorry, but I don't consider people who primarily like to tinker around building their own personal computers to be the ultimate elite in the computer technology realm. Wankers at best. Look, if I need my own UNIX-based server I'd opt for a machine I'd build myself and install Linux on. But when it comes to a workstation to get day-to-day work done, I prefer a Mac.
Happy people make bad consumers.
I can only think of you with pity for having encoded all 8000 songs in WMA, and then not being able to use them with a decent portable player.
You can use the iPod and never once have a DRM song touch your player. I have hundreds of CD's and they ripped just fine to DRM free MP3's.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley