Because Apple is frequently the victim of sloppy journalism designed to be controversial in order to attract attention in order to keep readership numbers up, I’m linking to a clever idea by Tom Scott here. Scott says:
It seems a bit strange to me that the media carefully warn about and label any content that involves sex, violence or strong language — but there’s no similar labelling system for, say, sloppy journalism and other questionable content.
And so he provides labels like this one:
or this one:
(images from Tom Scott at link above)
If you haven’t been involved with PR company or haven’t been a journalist you probably have no idea of how many articles in newspapers are simply ideas pushed by a PR company in order to benefit a client with no real “facts” behind a claim. I was running a startup company and our PR company told me we had to raise our profile and they started suggesting all sorts of articles and interview situations in which truth would be stretched in order for us to take a controversial position to be noticed. This was ugly and horrible but what was worse was that large and reputable news organisations were more than happy to oblige. The PR company in question had oodles of young (mostly female) employees who did nothing but comb the daily newspapers and radio outlets for stories which might become fodder for their clients to piggyback onto in order to “raise their profile”. These PR “managers” had close relationships with reporters and others at all the news outlets and would ring up a contact and say something like… “you know that article you just did on A-Level results? Well our client Mr X who is head at school A says that xxxyyy and not what your article reported. Would you like to hear him out so that you can give a balanced view to your reporting?” And an interivew or article would be arranged.
I did one at a major radio outlet in the midlands of England and then went home and soaked in the tub for an hour to get the sleeze off and vowed never to do another. Ugly stuff.
