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."

Comments

John Dvorak Filter

[Tassleman]

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.

Re:Dvorak whines again.

[Boone^]

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.

Re:Of course...

[Tyler Durden]

Those who know a lot about technology build their own machines and, nowadays, are putting GNU/Linux and other free software OSes on them. In fact, I've met tech journalists that hate Apple and all that they stand for. Apple computers have never been geared toward the tech savvy; they have always been marketed to the artistic technophobe.

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.

They will play MP3 though

[SuperKendall]

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.