You don't know the same journalists that I do. The job market in print media was so glutted with people a few years ago that people would do almost anything to get a part-time job on a newspaper, and so I think that the pressure to conform was pretty hard to resist. Maybe it's different on TV (I doubt it), or maybe the market isn't so flooded with out of work journalists, but it's pretty hard to see any real signs of integrity and competence on TV news shows. If NBC news bigshots would fake a truck exploding to make a story more zippy, what would they do under pressure of keeping their jobs?
That said, I doubt that we'll ever get a videotape of Ballmer picking up a phone and barking orders into it like Perry White in the old Superman show, but if "Oracle Stinks!" stories are looked on more favorably than "MSFT Loses the Internet" ones, then I'd bet a dollar which sort of story you'd see more of. People in academia will sell their souls for tenure, all the while insisting that they dedicated to the unbiased examination of all points of view. But if you see a couple of not-quite-PC people with better publication records and student evaluations get axed, somehow it becomes a lot easier to be mealy-mouthed. And when the job pays 10 times as much and getting it is primarily a matter of luck, it's a lot harder to have a backbone.
Maybe this is just the convictions of an idiot, but even if it's so, I bet it will be a lot easier for this idiot to keep his job than if he'd said equally stupid negative things about MSFT. |
