In the last few days I’ve stumbled across a couple of stories that illustrate perfectly the rottenness of the Apple reporting community. I’ve written in the past about how many of the Apple “journalists” are a bunch of shills for the developer community but even I didn’t think that they could be this bad.
I’m not a journalist. But I always thought that journalism involved some element of writing the truth for the public good. Meaning that not only do you try to report the facts, but that you also try to dispel false ideas. But using your publication to amplify false ideas is called propaganda.
Example #1 – Antonio Garcia-Martinez
9to5Mac reported about Garcia-Martinez a few months ago and they made him sound like a real knuckle-dragger. They didn’t do their homework and just parroted what a few whiny Apple employees were complaining about. They selectively broadcast a small piece from his book taken out of context.
Thanks to Matt Taibbi, I heard the other side of the story a few days ago. And it’s nothing like what 9to5Mac or others purported it to be. Antonio was extolling the virtues of this amazingly strong woman he was dating. He tried to emphasize her strength by contrasting against some of the weak women in the valley. Here is what Matt wrote regarding this fiasco:
He meets a woman via Match.com whom he calls British Trader, “an imposing, broad-shouldered presence, six feet tall in bare feet, and towering over me in heels.”
He’s enthralled, but everything about her is a surprise that keeps him off balance, from the fact that her “strapping and strutting” South African ex-boyfriend docks a boat next to his not long after their first date, or that she sleeps on “a cheap foam mattress about the width of an extra-jumbo-sized menstrual pad” above a floor covered from detritus from a recent renovation. She did such work herself because, Antonio explains, “she made Bob Vila of This Old House look like a fucking pussy.” Even this side of her life has him tiptoeing. “Postcoitally it was all I could do to balance myself on the edge of the pad and off the drywall dust,” he noted.
At one point, as a means of comparing the broad-shouldered British DIY expert favorably to other women he’d known, he wrote this:
Most women in the Bay Area are soft and weak, cosseted and naive despite their claims of worldliness, and generally full of shit. They have their self-regarding entitlement feminism, and ceaselessly vaunt their independence, but the reality is, come the epidemic plague or foreign invasion, they’d become precisely the sort of useless baggage you’d trade for a box of shotgun shells or a jerry can of diesel.
Out of context, you could, I guess, read this as bloviating from a would-be macho man beating his chest about how modern “entitlement feminism” would be unmasked as a fraud in a Mad Max scenario. In context, he’s obviously not much of a shotgun-wielder himself and is actually explaining why he fell for a strong woman, as the next passage reveals:
British Trader, on the other hand, was the sort of woman who would end up a useful ally in that postapocalypse, doing whatever work—be it carpentry, animal husbandry, or a shotgun blast to someone’s back—required doing.
Again, this is not a passage about women working in tech. It’s a throwaway line in a comedic recount of a romance that juxtaposes the woman he loves with the inadequate set of all others, a literary convention as old as writing itself. The only way to turn this into a commentary on the ability of women to work in Silicon Valley is if you do what Twitter naturally does and did, i.e. isolate the quote and surround it with mounds of James Damore references. More on this in a moment. – Matt Taibbi, TK News
It’s no different than some girl talking about how amazing her new boyfriend is and how he’s nothing like all the other scum guys she dated in the past. It would be wrong to say that she considers all men scum.
The reporting from 9to5Mac and other Apple tech sites around Antonio was crap. It made no effort to ask questions or uncover the truth. They should’ve at least given Antonio a fair shake and requested a comment from him. They should’ve tried to combat the false spin from a tiny group of malcontents at Apple who wanted to feel like they were fighting for a cause.
What those complainers at Apple did was raise a non-existent monster so they could take it down. And the writers in the Apple community aided and abetted their character assassination.
Example #2 – Guilherme Rambo
So, you’d think after what I just wrote that 9to5Mac is quick to crucify anyone that they perceive as morally repugnant? No, you’d be wrong. When it comes to their own employees, they do exactly the opposite and try to cover up misdeeds that are very real.
Guilherme Rambo was caught offering bribes by one of Apple’s agents. Here is reporting from Front Page Tech.
Andrey told Vice that he has a relationship with Apple’s anti-leak team, known as “Global Security” and it was his job to act as a “mole” by investigating and reporting leaks to the company.
That’s where 9to5Mac and writer Guilherme Rambo come into the story…
After meeting in the online “Apple Internal” community, Guilherme reportedly offered Andrey Shumeyko $500 worth of Bitcoin — now worth $3,592 USD — in exchange for information and data regarding (at the time) upcoming iPad Pro features. - John Prosser, Front Page Tech
Outside of Front Page Tech, I haven’t seen anyone else cover the fact that Guilherme Rambo was caught red-handed bribing for stolen goods. If John Prosser had been caught bribing for leaked information, it would have been in all of the headlines for a week. Why the double standard?
The double standard is indicative of a lack of principles. They decide how to cover a story based on how much they like the person involved. If they like the person, such as Rambo, they sweep it under the rug. If they dislike a person, like Garcia-Martinez, they’ll even amplify falsehoods. That’s the opposite of what journalism should be.
I got into blogging a few years ago because I was disgusted with the tech websites that cover Apple. There was no critical thought going on. The reporters would parrot back whatever propaganda the developers would send their way even if it made no sense. The conjecture of future product lines had no logic behind it. There was a total lack of understanding on how the business world actually works. But all of this can be forgiven.
This new level of rot which involves both railroading innocent people and hiding the guilty is unforgivable. These websites should be ashamed and I hope that if you are their readers, that you also let them know.
Example #1 – Antonio Garcia-Martinez
9to5Mac reported about Garcia-Martinez a few months ago and they made him sound like a real knuckle-dragger. They didn’t do their homework and just parroted what a few whiny Apple employees were complaining about. They selectively broadcast a small piece from his book taken out of context.
Thanks to Matt Taibbi, I heard the other side of the story a few days ago. And it’s nothing like what 9to5Mac or others purported it to be. Antonio was extolling the virtues of this amazingly strong woman he was dating. He tried to emphasize her strength by contrasting against some of the weak women in the valley. Here is what Matt wrote regarding this fiasco:
He meets a woman via Match.com whom he calls British Trader, “an imposing, broad-shouldered presence, six feet tall in bare feet, and towering over me in heels.”
He’s enthralled, but everything about her is a surprise that keeps him off balance, from the fact that her “strapping and strutting” South African ex-boyfriend docks a boat next to his not long after their first date, or that she sleeps on “a cheap foam mattress about the width of an extra-jumbo-sized menstrual pad” above a floor covered from detritus from a recent renovation. She did such work herself because, Antonio explains, “she made Bob Vila of This Old House look like a fucking pussy.” Even this side of her life has him tiptoeing. “Postcoitally it was all I could do to balance myself on the edge of the pad and off the drywall dust,” he noted.
At one point, as a means of comparing the broad-shouldered British DIY expert favorably to other women he’d known, he wrote this:
Most women in the Bay Area are soft and weak, cosseted and naive despite their claims of worldliness, and generally full of shit. They have their self-regarding entitlement feminism, and ceaselessly vaunt their independence, but the reality is, come the epidemic plague or foreign invasion, they’d become precisely the sort of useless baggage you’d trade for a box of shotgun shells or a jerry can of diesel.
Out of context, you could, I guess, read this as bloviating from a would-be macho man beating his chest about how modern “entitlement feminism” would be unmasked as a fraud in a Mad Max scenario. In context, he’s obviously not much of a shotgun-wielder himself and is actually explaining why he fell for a strong woman, as the next passage reveals:
British Trader, on the other hand, was the sort of woman who would end up a useful ally in that postapocalypse, doing whatever work—be it carpentry, animal husbandry, or a shotgun blast to someone’s back—required doing.
Again, this is not a passage about women working in tech. It’s a throwaway line in a comedic recount of a romance that juxtaposes the woman he loves with the inadequate set of all others, a literary convention as old as writing itself. The only way to turn this into a commentary on the ability of women to work in Silicon Valley is if you do what Twitter naturally does and did, i.e. isolate the quote and surround it with mounds of James Damore references. More on this in a moment. – Matt Taibbi, TK News
It’s no different than some girl talking about how amazing her new boyfriend is and how he’s nothing like all the other scum guys she dated in the past. It would be wrong to say that she considers all men scum.
The reporting from 9to5Mac and other Apple tech sites around Antonio was crap. It made no effort to ask questions or uncover the truth. They should’ve at least given Antonio a fair shake and requested a comment from him. They should’ve tried to combat the false spin from a tiny group of malcontents at Apple who wanted to feel like they were fighting for a cause.
What those complainers at Apple did was raise a non-existent monster so they could take it down. And the writers in the Apple community aided and abetted their character assassination.
Example #2 – Guilherme Rambo
So, you’d think after what I just wrote that 9to5Mac is quick to crucify anyone that they perceive as morally repugnant? No, you’d be wrong. When it comes to their own employees, they do exactly the opposite and try to cover up misdeeds that are very real.
Guilherme Rambo was caught offering bribes by one of Apple’s agents. Here is reporting from Front Page Tech.
Andrey told Vice that he has a relationship with Apple’s anti-leak team, known as “Global Security” and it was his job to act as a “mole” by investigating and reporting leaks to the company.
That’s where 9to5Mac and writer Guilherme Rambo come into the story…
After meeting in the online “Apple Internal” community, Guilherme reportedly offered Andrey Shumeyko $500 worth of Bitcoin — now worth $3,592 USD — in exchange for information and data regarding (at the time) upcoming iPad Pro features. - John Prosser, Front Page Tech
Outside of Front Page Tech, I haven’t seen anyone else cover the fact that Guilherme Rambo was caught red-handed bribing for stolen goods. If John Prosser had been caught bribing for leaked information, it would have been in all of the headlines for a week. Why the double standard?
The double standard is indicative of a lack of principles. They decide how to cover a story based on how much they like the person involved. If they like the person, such as Rambo, they sweep it under the rug. If they dislike a person, like Garcia-Martinez, they’ll even amplify falsehoods. That’s the opposite of what journalism should be.
I got into blogging a few years ago because I was disgusted with the tech websites that cover Apple. There was no critical thought going on. The reporters would parrot back whatever propaganda the developers would send their way even if it made no sense. The conjecture of future product lines had no logic behind it. There was a total lack of understanding on how the business world actually works. But all of this can be forgiven.
This new level of rot which involves both railroading innocent people and hiding the guilty is unforgivable. These websites should be ashamed and I hope that if you are their readers, that you also let them know.
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