PressEthic

The books that we have recently read make a case for or against a liberal bias in the media. Bernard Goldberg goes to great limits in his diatribe to portray top journalists as elitist intellectuals out of touch with most Americans. While there was a lot in his book that I disagreed with (in fact, anytime Goldberg strayed from his one main point and tried to talk about something like AIDS or feminists he lost any credit I had given him), I will agree that a lot of journalists are of a certain ilk, and this probably affects news coverage, or at least makes some news sources uncomfortably self-conscious every once in a while.

But what happens when an inherent bias creeps into coverage based on the kind of technology a journalist uses? Namely, as an article points out in PC Magazine, what happens when more and more journalists overwhelmingly prefer Macs to PCs? In an article titled “Media Bias and Technology Reporting,” John Dvorak speculates that writers are biased towards Macs, and it is having an effect on Microsoft's coverage in the media. I’m not sure where Dvorak found this data, but he says that 90% of today’s writers are Mac users. That’s quite unbalanced if it is anywhere near true.

Dvorak writes:

What's bad for Microsoft is that the bias against it is subtle—kind of like any sort of media bias, whether religious or political. As one critic once said regarding the supposed left-wing slant of the daily news media, "It's not what they write, it's what they write ABOUT that matters." Story selection. Microsoft can roll out a dozen cool products, and the media goes ga-ga over the video iPod—a rather late-to-market Apple product. They all swoon over the prospect of paying $2 to download an otherwise free TV show so they can have the privilege of watching it on a 2-inch screen.

At first, I thought this whole article was a bit far-fetched. But I thought about my own experiences--mere dabbles in technology: an iPod here, a digital camera there--in the past couple of years. At my college, our computer labs had more Macs than PCs, and in-class computers were all Macs, and we had to save work to a zip disk, so I ended up preferring the Macs in the labs as well. I had a PC laptop, but when I was preparing to go to grad school, I bought a Mac laptop. There was no question in my mind about it. The thing is, I don’t even really know why. It’s just the way it is. Now here is something that I think argues for the opposite side: I bought the Apple program iWork instead of Microsoft Office, mostly because it was half the price and I guess I begrudge Microsoft’s hold on the word processing market. iWork has Pages as it’s word processing program. I have been using it all semester, and I hate it. As soon as I can afford it, I will buy MS Office. I know that the reason I hate it is because I have literally been programmed to use Word. Anything else just feels...wrong. I suppose that the same thing could be said of a reporter who uses a Mac. No matter what Microsoft comes out with, it’s just not going to be as good as a Mac, because it’s not familiar.

However, Dvorak’s article seems to make my point about MS Word, without really being conscious of it. He reminisces about a time in the ‘70s and ‘80s when everyone used Wordstar word processing. When a new product came out, it was given poor reviews unless it was a replica of Wordstar. One could certainly say the same thing for Word. And this creates an interesting rift in the theory: people hate Microsoft even though they probably use Word. Maybe they are like me and feel coerced into using it, because it's the enforced norm.

So, back to Dvorak’s argument. Are journalists biased when it comes to Microsoft and Apple? I found this article to be pretty convincing, though perhaps a bit exaggerated. I wonder if we found out that 90% of fashion writers shopped at Barney's if that would make their objectivity suspect. I'm not sure I'm convinced. On the flip side, my post from yesterday certainly supports Dvorak's theory. As does the article that Courtney linked to in her comment.