Are Media Writers Biased Towards Apple? 747
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."
that's a refreshing change (Score:3, Interesting)
Bias (Score:3, Interesting)
The vast majority of the world has a Microsoft bias (myself included, sadly, tho I have an offsetting Unix bias as well
Since MS users are trained to handle an overly obtuse interface, we find Apple interfaces simplistic and limiting.
Min
John Dvorak Filter (Score:5, Interesting)
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Dvorak whines again. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Mac bashing? (Score:3, Interesting)
I also use iTunes, becuase honestly, it does two things that I want -- plays MP3s and keeps my iPod synced, and otherwise doesn't irritate me or inundate me with ads.
I'll probably choose to use Photoshop, because Gimp (and MacGimp) are limited to 8-bits-per-pixel and have crap for color management.
Why are all these important?
Because I choose to use them. There are alternatives, to varying degrees, but overall, the stuff that comes bundled with OS X is all quite usable, unlike the crap that comes bundled with Windows. When you buy a Mac, you get a tabbed browser based on the Gecko engine, a decent mail application that can support PGP, and an OS that can talk to just about any type of service -- AFS, NFS, SMB, you name it.
MSM journalists = not typically budget conscious (Score:2, Interesting)
Apple products are boutique items. They are products with style and image for people who care about such things (and with the money to pay for it).
In the educational world, Mac still has a dominant influence (where educational discounts abound). I once took an graduate instructional technology course and was amazed to find that all the computer labs we used were Mac based. (That was 4 years ago, when open source was still viewed with suspicion).
I don't like windows, and lots of open source people probably don't either. So by default does that mean we love Macs?
Well, no. For me, I am cost conscious. When talking about the MS tax, we must not forget that Mac hardware just is out of the league to comparable PC products.
The ipod/itunes products have represented major advances in their respective industries (although not too advanced;; dollar for dollar the iriver (for example) matches better against ipods, and even supports open source codecs like ogg. Itunes has innovations, yes, and usability, but more importantly they have implicit support from content providers and can cobrand their products with the music they sell. Pretty clever, but....how does that help consumers wanting to find new, cheap and independent music?
Here's an excerpt from a letter I wrote to the NYT in 2003 complaining about the inordinate amount of coverage of itunes/pay musical services...
"If 90-95% of all mp3's out are by unsigned artists who allow downloading and if the only download methods mentioned in your articles are subscriptions with multibillion dollar media companies, what does this say about the journalistic integrity of the New York Times? I know New York Times accepts advertisements from all of these companies, and this seems to be an example of how the Times is compromising its journalistic integrity by ignoring the vast majority of legal ways to obtain mp3's for free. These articles seem designed more to appease advertisers than to provide reliable newsworthy information."
(To be fair, after I sent that letter, NYT did provide light coverage of free and nonDRM download services. But every three months or so NYT does the obligatory roundup of pay music services, and every time it concludes that the best "deal" is to buy DRMed music from Universal/Sony/etc. )
Dvorak (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:So bloke writing for a Windows Mag... (Score:5, Interesting)
It's just like Hollywood (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:In Other News... (Score:2, Interesting)
If it's something to do about hot grits then it's another matter alltogether though...
Is this a campaign?? (Score:3, Interesting)
What I find interesting is this story yesterday in the largest Swedish morning news paper and The Register. After a Dvorak column a few days earlier.
Is Dvorak (of all nitwits!) so much copied!? Is this some sort of campaign?
I remember reading at least a decade of rah rah articles about Microsoft, up to being declared guilty in their big trial. And quite a bit after.
(-: I mean, it is a well known phenomenon that big advertisers get terrible press. So of course Microsoft gets slaughtered in the press. :-)
Re:Less-qualified (Score:3, Interesting)
I might even go so far as to suggest that most people who use macs -- and I mean acutally USE them to do real work -- spend more time in their Terminal window than a windows user of the same caliber. Is it because of a failing of the "simplistic" UI that doesnt bother the user with 1000 options that will be used by almost nobody or is it because Windows lacks both the tools and organizational structure to actually manage anything on the commandline?
Re:What about slashdot? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Of course... (Score:1, Interesting)
I am a technology writer, and I know a lot of technology writers. Most use Linux or Windows because that's their beat and it's hard to write about a platform that you don't use. But unless they write for an Apple-centric pub, tech journalists do not usually use Macs, especially the most tech-savvy of the lot.
Re:What about slashdot? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:HA! (Score:4, Interesting)
You have to separate the writing of articles/columns/books from the editing and layout tasks. The latter are normally done on Macs, yes, and that was a very natural evolution. The non-techies (think English majors, graphic design artists, etc.) found the Mac systems easier and more intuitive to use, so of course the software developers took note and developed software for that market. Seems like a perfect example of one company managing to dominate a vertical market. Kudos to Apple for that.
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. (IBM being one exception, they want you to write it using XML, which actually can be more of a pain.)
Yes, it's ironic that most of the pro-Windows books out there today end up being edited and composited on Macs. But that's just the way the industry works today. I think calling it a bias is an exaggeration.
EricHow I keep my dogs safe in my yard [ericgiguere.com]
Makes sense (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Less-qualified (Score:3, Interesting)
* Adobe Photoshop
* Adobe Illustrator
* Adobe InDesign
* Quark xPress
* Digidesign ProTools
* Apple Logic
* Steinberg Cubase/Nuendo
Re:HA! (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Maybe (Score:3, Interesting)
It's true enough that the journalists aren't considering every possible need, and a good journalist would take note, at least, that the heavy laptop isn't bad if you're going to leave it on your desk all the time. However, in fairness, for most of us, heavy laptops do stink. Anything over, I don't know exactly, but around 6 lbs.-- it's just not worth carrying anywhere.
So yes, there are instances when these huge and heavy laptops are useful, but it's sort of a niche market. Though it might still warrant mention in a thorough review, most of the people for whom it really makes sense to buy a laptop are those who will want a machine they can pick up and take with them. After going to college during the great laptop revolution, as well as working in IT for several years now, I'd attribute a lot of the heavy-laptop purchases to a sort of laptop fetish. Guys who really want a desktop, but the mere idea of a laptop is too sexy to give up. The result is that they're hunched over their laptops playing some FPS all day (because laptops are inherently bad for ergonomics) and never take the things *anywhere*.
So in my mind, it'd be like a movie reviewer saying, "Doom is a bad movie" rather than "Doom is a bad movie, but if you're in the mood for a dumb, mindless, action movie starring a wrestler and some mutant zombies, you might like it." The first statement isn't wrong, but yes, there might be some people in the mood for a dumb movie.
(disclaimer: I haven't actually seen Doom, but it looks really bad)
Media and Showbiz and John D. (Score:2, Interesting)
Packaging and Content is an almost orgiastic celebrated experienced Apple orchestrates (I mean look at this engadget piece of gargantuan designer-porn [engadget.com] for heavens sake). It's showbiz. The media just looooves showbiz. I you've ever watched Fox News you immediatly recognize that they just serve a giant horror flick that tries to scare you - but it's a movie "based on real events" as they say in showbiz.
Asking if the showbiz is biased towards showbiz is like asking, if the fat kid is biased towards candy.
I think John C. Dvorak has an inherent anti-showbiz attitude that I give him great credit for. If you visit This Week in Tech, Episode 22 [thisweekintech.com] you will hear from 7:30 on that he holds an ipod in his hands for the first time in his life and he says it's pretty cool. This is the effect this product has on many people and mostly people connect to this positive experience.
On another point - media is expected to cover events of interest to the general populace. As Apple tends to implement certain changes earlier in their finished, shipping consumer product (USB, WIFi, iTMS, ZeroConf, mac-mini-formfactor, Quad processors come to mind) they do provide a nice outlet of new and upcoming tech trends in consumer tech land. So while there may be a correlation between showbiz-loving cutting-edge consumers and their reports on a showbiz-cutting-edge consumertech corporation I do not think it is necessarily a causality.
Considering the source... (Score:5, Interesting)
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 sense a new '... is dying' (Score:3, Interesting)
Heh. Now there's an argument the WinMedia didn't use against Linux. I'm not sure it speaks well of Windows though.
Meanwhile, some of the Unix sysadmins I know have recently switched to a Mac.
Therefore, if the non-technological end of the market goes to Apple because they 'simply cannot use a Microsoft Windows computer' and the tech-savvy are running Linux (and/or Mac's), what will become of Windows?
It sounds almost like Dvorak is trying to say 'Windows is dying!'??
--
Baremetalbits: A minimalist barebones computer review site [baremetalbits.com]
Re:Human Nature (Score:3, Interesting)
The burning desire to make wonderful things is something you rarely see, and it's most often seen in private companies, not in free software. Every free software product I can think of but the GIMP is just a pale copy of something already designed by commercial organizations. And I think the GIMP created a user interface only its creators love.
I'm glad Linux is succeeding in many areas - better it than the rapacious Gates. But it's just a copy of Unix, just as mySQL is a copy of Oracle or DB2, just as KDE is a copy of Windows 2000.
I'm a Mac guy because what I really want in a computer is one where a team of people works consistently to design something both original and great. So far, free software, which is more about adhering to standards than anything else, hasn't done anything like that.
D
Re:Of course... (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:If it bleeds it leads (Score:2, Interesting)
The thing is, and here's where media coverage is biased, Steve Jobs is charismatic. The reality distortion field is nothing more than that. He's a strong and interesting leader that can make people feel the way he wants them to feel. He's a skilled orator.
Bill Gates, on the other hand... Isn't. He's dull, both to look at and to listen to.
Pretty and interesting people get more coverage in the media because they "give good face." Steve Jobs is probably the most stylish tech personality there is. That's why the media listens to him.
Re:Human Nature (Score:1, Interesting)
The iPod is NOT innovative. Innovation's definition is specifically something _new_. Soft rounded edges and a UI, however simple, do not count as innovations for a MUSIC PLAYER. Fairplay is about the only "new" thing the iPod brings to the table. It doesn't bring better, more sophisticated and higher quality audio, it doesn't give us psycho-low-bitrate codecs a la sony, frankly I don't know what about it actually is innovative.
Another slashdotter said it best; You guys (mac users) are way too emotional to be nerds.
Many journalists/typesetters use Macs (Score:2, Interesting)
There were 5 Macs, and over a dozen PCs around, that could be signed up for to do the work. This was prior to everyone having a PC at their desk. Most guys didn't need one there.
The 5 Macs had a waiting list of a few days for doing word processing. You could walk in at any time and use a PC, no worries or hassles over someone else using one. Why?
Because when you used a word processor on a Mac, what you saw on the screen was what you saw on the paper when you printed it. Plain and simple. You could use any word processor on a PC, and it wouldn't be a truetype font, no matter what you used. So, folks started to fight over the use of the Macs to get a proper visual representation of what their document would look like.
That sentimentality really took hold with journalists. They really wanted to see what that article was going to look like, so it went to the editor with a better presentation. And a mindset was born.
Add to that the prevalence that most schools/universites had for Macs through special programs that Apple has/had, and journalists came out of school knowing the Mac more often than they knew the PC outside of gaming. And with the lack of games for the Mac, it carries are more "workplace computer" air than the PC does.
Apple is very good at product placement, too. If you watch any movie that has someone that does writing, they always seem to have a Mac laptop in hand, or a Mac in their office. It's a deliberate ploy by Apple to make sure their computers are viewed as journalist friendly.
Today, you can do all of that with a PC, for sure. But, the mindset of most journalists have been set.
Newton's a rehash of.. (Score:2, Interesting)
The Go Company pen computer
The Momenta Company pen computer
The PI Systems Company pen computer
Just a few that I can remember from the time. There were others.
Apple never does anything new. It puts other people's good products into an Apple package and puts out a press release. Then the news media people, who all use Apple computers, go bonkers.
Apple products are like the products of the high fashion industry. High style, pretty people, good quality fabrics and tailoring, fantastic press coverage. But completely worthless for the mass marketplace.
Re:Less-qualified (Score:3, Interesting)
It's also worth noting that although I fail to see the point of your list of productive, worthwhile applications with a GUI (Holy cow! I'm using a GUI even NOW!!!), the only mac-only app you listed is Logic, not that it even really matters. "The right tool for the job!"
They will play MP3 though (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:It Just Works (Score:2, Interesting)
Of course, this is nothing compared to the number of times I've expressed rage at my Windows boxen, specifically, Windows itself.
Come to think of it, computers have inspired a lot of wrath in me over the years ... not very healthy...
Re:What about slashdot? (Score:2, Interesting)
and even though i do use linux (the config options rock) i don't usually feel like writing about it. there's all this free software, and i can download it and compile/run it, and that's really cool. i'm not all that interested in how ready everybody's proverbial grandmother is to run linux, or how well a hypothetical set of "average" users will respond to the gui; it's just not that pertinent (imo). now a program that does something new and does it well would be good to hear about, as would a new thing you can do with linux/bsd computers. stories about people using free software to do big things are also pretty neat. yro articles are important to me, and maybe some action articles like petitioning a manufacturer for driver info would also be welcome. articles that invite furious debate over brand recognition aren't as enriching to me.
Re:Human Nature (Score:3, Interesting)
People sure have short memories. Not long ago, all the articles were about "beleaguered Apple". I guess that was because, back then, all the journalists were using Windows machines, right? The difference now is that Apple somehow convinced them all to switch using underhanded techniques like making good computers.
And, while business use is increasing, I'm not sure what percentage of the market shares are for personal vs. business use:
but I believe that personal use is significantly higher than business use for Macs, and significantly higher for business use than personal for Dell, meaning that the percentage of PEOPLE who are more interested in what Apple is doing compared to what Dell is doing is a lot higher than what you think.I personally am excited to see new products out of Apple. The new Power Macs and Powerbooks are more exciting to me than the announcements about new iPods (video or otherwise) or the new iMacs, even though those show more the direction Apple might be headed. It shows that Apple has not yet abandoned the PPC market, that current products really will be supported for some time to come despite a transition to Intel processors.
BTW, for anyone who is positive that Apple will stop using PPC processors by the end of 2007 should remember that Steve Jobs denied the possibility of a video iPod right up until he announced it. If IBM is producing chips in 2007 that meet needs of Apple customers, there's no reason for Apple to stop using them simply because in 2005 they said they would. They still have to deal with getting developers to produce 64-bit native Intel code , which is much less of a problem on the PPC architecture (since PPC-32 is a subset of PPC-64). With the x86-64, you get more improvement in performance than simply increasing register size and address space (which, depending on the application, might not get you much if anything). With PPC, if there's no need to go to 64 bit, then there's no performance penalty for not making the move. For low power stuff (e.g. laptops, Mac Mini), the Intel line will probably do fine. For high performance, they may find that upcoming IBM chips continue to make sense.