Dan Gillmor at Mediactive raises an interesting question of ethics in his look at the New York Times’s dealings with Apple.
Apple has been featuring the Times very prominently on the iPad page on its website, brought out a Times exec at the iPad launch back in January, and in fact Apple and the Times have been getting very cozy with each other in general.
It makes sense: Apple wants big media franchises to appear on its iPad to drive the device’s sales, while the Times is trying everything it can to monetize itself as ad revenues fall. (For instance, the recent announcement it was going to raise its electronic subscription prices to $19.99.)
What Gillmor wonders is whether the Times paid Apple for its prominent placement, and more importantly whether there is a conflict of interest here—and why the New York Times hasn’t attempted to address it.
What matters is the Times’ seeming indifference to the way this looks. Even though I don’t believe there was any quid pro quo, I do believe that someone who doesn’t know the players could reasonably ask if an arrangement did exist.
Another question Gillmor is asking that no one seems to be answering is whether Apple could remove the New York Times’s (and other media organizations’) e-reading apps if those media organizations say something Apple doesn’t like.
Gillmor has severe reservations about news organizations becoming so close to a company that has had such a history of restrictive practices as Apple—forcing publications to change or remove material it considered inappropriate (we covered one novelist being forced to remove the “f-word” from his encapsulated e-book app at Apple’s behest), and attacking journalists in a number of ways.
Again, Apple has every right to push around its customers and media “partners” in pursuit of its business goals. What bothers me is the media companies’ willingness to cede so much of their authority to a company that has demonstrated its willingness to abuse it.
I think Gillmor makes some good points. Not just the Times but a number of other media organizations have been cozying up to Apple. As I mentioned the other day, Rupert Murdoch seems to think the iPad will “save” publishing. The question is, how are these organizations going to be able to report objectively on the actions of their “savior”?
(Found via BoingBoing.)
“Apple has every right to push around its customers and media “partners” in pursuit of its business goals.”
No, it doesn’t. That this statement can be made, that it can be accepted without question and allowed to pass unchallenged, tells me all I need to know about the Cult of Apple and its relationship with the tech press. Looks like it’s not just the Times whose journalistic integrity is in question.
Actually, I don’t think you’re reading that in the sense in which it was meant.
This is a free, capitalist country. Apple does have every right to push around its customers and media “partners” in pursuit of its business goals. There’s no laws against it.
We may not like them doing it, but they do have every right to.
Be practical. The New York Times has been thrashing about in bed with the Democratic party for years. It matters little if their executives occasionally lunch with Steve Jobs.
Look at the big picture. Jobs once compared heading Pepsi to “selling sugar water.” On the world scale, selling iPhones is ‘sugar water’ in comparison to containing rogue states going nuclear such as Iran and North Korea. Apple’s world is so quickly outdated that last year’s iPhone 3G won’t even run this year’s OS 4.0. In contrast, thanks to the NY Times fan boy treatment, we now have a president who insults allies and panders to the world’s thugocracies, making the world far less safe. Nuking Tel Avi, Rome are Paris is much more important than what OS runs on your iPhone.
You also misunderstand modern politics if you fret that Apple will censor the NY Times. Our nation’s chattering classes regard the NY Times as virtually the source of all truth. It tells them what to think about a myriad of topics. They’re no more likely to censor it than a sincere Catholic would censor the Pope. Apple executives may get furious when a NY Times columnist gives one of their products a bad review, but on the larger issues, the Times tells them what to think and they follow meekly along.
For the background, see Jacque Ellul’s masterpiece, Propaganda. In it he notes that propaganda for the uneducated appeals to the raw emotions, typically hate. In contrast, propaganda for the educated appeals to their key weakness. Education has made them believe that they ought to know answers to a wide array of issues about which they have no experience or real knowledge. Rather than simply say, “I don’t know” like someone with less education would do, or rather than engage in the hard labor of actually becoming informed, they choose a source (say the NY Times) and regard it as virtually infallible. Any contrary source, say Fox News, confuses them and hence has to be rejected outright.
Control that one source and you control their minds. That’s how propaganda for the educated works.
Thankfully, we don’t actually live in a free capitalist society.
I wouldn’t be surprised if Apple gets hit with some sort of antitrust lawsuit, given that it seems to be acting in a decidedly unfair manner.