I have a problem with media, from Fox News all the way through the Young Turks. Right or left it does not matter, what we have been exposed to is ragged yellow

Yellow Journalism (Photo credit: Kevin H.)

journalism, regardless of your political leanings. We can use yellow journalism to start a war, and indeed we have for the last 100 years, “Remember the Main” starting off a nice little war with Cuba and the Spanish Empire. We have also seen it used to beat the drums for Iraq, and unfortunately for Iran as well. What makes the latest round of yellow journalism interesting is that the story line from This American Life which featured the brutality of Apples China Factories has been retracted with a full statement of what went wrong.

While you can read Mr. Daisey’s response over here, and it is kind of turgid “I am into the Thea-ater, I am a Star” by line, unrepentant about the “artistic quality of the whole thing”. This American Life is a news outlet, taken in by what many people are thinking a simple con. Of course we want to know all about the reason why as a fact Foxconn employees committed suicide a couple of years back. That does not mean we get the ability to fabricate problems out of whole cloth. While it is admirable that This American Life has retraced the story and will air another story about how they got suckered and hoodwinked, this is more the tip of the iceberg issue.

We as American media consumers have gotten so used to being lied to, with distorted information, spun to reflect only one point in what is a chain of events that media in its own right has become a propaganda tool. This video pretty much so sums up the problems with media today. Go click and watch.

We are dealing with an age of Yellow Journalism in its most blatant form, regardless of your political leanings. Right, left or center, American Media is a propaganda tool, that is completely adding to the climate of fear, fear of others, fear of Islam, fear of the republican “war on women”, fear of state government telling a doctor to go through and add to the distress of a medical procedure, of the “war on drugs” and the disaster that has created in Mexico and in Central and South America, the fear that all our jobs are going overseas, fear of homosexuality, fear of the degeneration of the morals of America and the upcoming war on Porn, as well as everything else that the media tries to scare us into believing.

I want a responsible media.

Sadly I don’t think I am going to get it, as we fracture and fragment media consumption into smaller and smaller world view enforcing newspapers, TV channels, blogs, Facebook and G+ posts, we will find that our most outrageous fears, our most scary thoughts, and our most horrific beliefs are going to be supported by some small group someone. Like minds find each other, they support each other, and they close off opposing thoughts or ideas.

We argue and fight on TV, we don’t listen because we don’t have to, we have our micro audience. We have our sponsors who are funding the current round of Yellow Journalism for whatever purpose they want to, with a ready audience and a ready consumer base willing to believe the most outrageous statements and hyperbole until we get a truly “fair and balanced” media that presents both points, in a civil manner with the understanding that they are influencing people, we will be stuck in the propaganda machine that is Yellow Journalism. For me, I am swearing off media for while just to I can get my head back together and realize that life actually is pretty cool, and when you take away fear, we all seem to get along pretty good with each other.

This American Life and Mr. Daisey are simply symptoms, pray we find a cure before we really do something stupid where the rest of the world has to step in and do something even more stupid. At least This American Life had the cojones to step up to the plate, apologize, and explain how this happened. I would like to see other media outlets at least do the same thing, and when they are being hypocritical, at least step up the plate and try to inform the audience fairly that you can’t have it both ways.

Related articles

• This American Life retracts ‘Mr. Daisey Goes to the Apple Factory’ episode (thetechblock.com)
• No truth in the news, no news in the truth (geekwarrior.net)

Image via CrunchBase

Is this one of the first chinks in Apples armor for eBooks? I have tried repeatedly to use the eBook development kit for Apple, and honestly from a user friendly and programmatic viewpoint it is probably the worst chunk of software pushed by Apple. If the eBook fits all specifications and everyone from Amazon to smash words will work with the files we are converting and sending over, they still won’t work with the Apple eBook upload system. Now Amazon has come up with something that pulls a significant chunk of potential revenue right from Apple and back to Amazon’s hands. Welcome to Amazon’s new cloud reader. And it is a shot right across the bow of Apple’s policies about who gets a cut of what when it comes to the sales of a product via the IPad. If you do not believe that it is aimed right at the Ipad, take a look at the Cloud Readers home page.

For authors this is actually a good thing, if you think about it for a moment so bear with me. Amazon has two revenue schemas for eBooks, the 35% royalty option and the 70% royalty option. Amazon has not posted how many people are choosing the 70% option for their royalty schema, but I would lay odds that any book priced over a dollar is taking the 70% option. If you sell your eBook for a dollar then you have to take the 35% option, you cannot choose the 70% option. All the books we publish on Kindle are the 70% option, meaning Amazon gets their 30% cut, and then they charge me for delivery costs of the eBook. Apple taking an additional 30% makes the entire process a money losing business for Amazon for any book priced over a dollar where the author has the 70% option, and Amazon has not just sent over the higher royalty books to Apple. You run the numbers this starts getting costly for Amazon very quickly.

I do not think that a lot of people are going to be worried about buying it online and reading it via the web because it is a simple HTML5 wrapper using the safari rendering engine. This is an elegant and simple way of dealing with the issue, sell it as an app in the app store from Apple, and then there you go, your kindle bookshelf on your Ipad and no one is really going to care about the mechanics of how it got there, or if it resides in the cloud or locally on the device. As long as there is an internet or cell connection, reading books on the beach just got a lot easier and a lot more cost effective for Amazon.

The question is how many other people are going to follow suit to help keep Apple out of the “profit loop” by wrapping their own content in a free application to read, listen, or watch stuff on the Ipad. I know this works for Netflix, now Amazon, who is next on this one, and how long will it take Apple to backlash on this? Apple still has to pay for storing and approving the application, but they will not see a revenue stream from it at all.

This was previously posted on Techwag 2.0 in August of 2011

Related articles

• Apple To Justice Department: E-Book Antitrust? WTF?!? (cultofmac.com)
• Apple defends itself over ebook price fixing allegations (theverge.com)
• U.S. Threatens Apple With E-book Antitrust Suit (newsy.com)