On bias.
Brooke Crothers, writing for CNET:
Apple-centric blogs play an important role in disseminating information about what is probably the most important consumer-electronics company in the world. But the coverage is hardly neutral.
While not all that surprising, the FUD factor can get pretty hot and heavy sometimes. You know, that tendency to try to discredit any major threats to Apple’s dominance. Namely, Android.
Take the blog Daring Fireball. It offers some solid analysis. But in the end it’s a fanboi site, assailing the misinformed or pointing out how wrong or disliked the Android competition is. That kind of attitude gets in the way of informed insight.
There’s nothing wrong with being biased, assuming you’re upfront about it.
Give me biased and right over fair and clueless any day of the week.
It’s acceptable, of course, to discuss whether Gruber is right often enough to overlook his biases, but Crothers doesn’t offer any such argument, so we’ll just assume he’s trolling. (One link does not constitute what I would call an argument.)
My experience, though, is that Gruber is often right, even if he’s often snarky, or brash, or smug.
At any rate, it doesn’t matter if I’m talking about politics, technology, soft news, or hard news: Being right — or at least being knowledgable — is more important, and even more desirable, than being unbiased.
When considering an obvious bias, here’s how I’d evaluate the usefulness of the source, from very to not at all:
- Being right
Bias doesn’t even play into this, really. If you’re right, you’re right, and if you contest “right” with accusations of bias you’re an idiot and/or a bigger fanboy than the person you’re calling out. - Being knowledgable
Short of being right, being knowledgable enough about a subject to support or defend your bias is the best you can hope for. Bias mixed with knowledge makes for a compelling stew. - Cluelessness
Is it even possible to be clueless and biased at the same time? There’s almost nothing interesting about someone who is unbiased but also clueless whereas being biased but also clueless is indefensible. Nothing to see here, move along. - Being wrong
If you’re often wrong, and biased, you’re in trouble. (It’s akin to being a cocky loser.) - Being intentionally wrong
If you’re intentionally wrong, and biased, you are, at best, an asshole.
I’d put Gruber somewhere between being right and being knowledgable. The surest way to piss people off is by being consistently right.
I’d put the best tech blogs in the category of knowledgable.
I’d put most of the mainstream media — when it comes to tech coverage — at clueless.
I’d put Crothers somewhere between being wrong and being clueless, with a dab of intentionally, casually, wrong. Classic troll territory.
Synonym: Payroll Pundit.
Fox news skews towards being intentionally wrong.
If you’re right, you’ve no need to hide your bias. If you’re wrong, or especially if you’re intentionally wrong, you’re probably going out of you way to do so.
I would argue that the more we know, the more likely we are to harbor biases: Science.
I would also argue that the less we know, the more likely we are to harbor biases: Religion.
It’s not all that hard to tell the difference, really, but Crothers seems to lack the intellectual honesty necessary to even try. He’d rather accuse, than analyze.
He’s probably not paid enough to do both.
Of comments and weeds.
When we bought our house, we looked out into the massive backyard and we were amazed by the lush garden brimming with flowers and vegetables and fruit trees.
That vision sucked us into a fantasy world of possibility: “Oh, what we could do with that! Vegetables from our garden for dinner! Sipping mojitos as we blissfully pluck flowers and water our lawn!”
Five years later, we’ve completely pulled out the garden (no more vegetables at all and only a few remaining flowers) whilst our trees rarely produce edible fruit. The only plant-like things that seem to thrive (whether we encourage them or not) are weeds and vines. Whenever something pleasant does bloom, our yard is overrun with rabbits and bees and wasps and squirrels.
Gardening—successfully gardening, anyway—is a ridiculous amount of work.
Gruber is a long-time proponent of comment-free content and Wilcox argues that they’re an inherent and necessary aspect of the web.
It’s all fairly subjective, but my experience on the one website (Newsvine) where I ever had to deal with a significant number of comments is that, like gardening, successfully moderating comment threads is a ridiculous amount of work and—if you’re not serious about it—you’re going to fail.
It’s safe to assume that Gruber, if he allowed comments, would end up with hundreds or even thousands on every article he posted. In this hypothetical, there’s no sense in treating him like an average blogger or even an average journalist because his reach is massive.
As such, he’d have to spend a sizable portion of his day simply making sure that the worst of the offensive comments (racist slurs, threats, vulgarity, etc.) were either 1) deleted outright or 2) handled in a manner which would avoid further inflaming the situation. Then, in an effort to justify the “discussion” he’d be inviting, he’d need to personally respond to the valid and/or valuable comments, lest he be accused of keeping his distance from a more engaged audience or of being a stand-offish dick. Part of his daily moderation duties would involve keeping everyone (the civil and the not so civil) on topic. Comment spam is another issue.
All of that is without even mentioning that Gruber is an Apple enthusiast who writes primarily about Apple related topics. Short of abortion, I’m not sure there’s a more contentious topic on the Internet.
Assuming all that is taken care of, Gruber is no longer acting first and foremost as a writer, he’s writing around his efforts to keep up with his comment threads.
For someone in his position, I don’t really see an upside: He either contributes less (or worse) content in order to moderate properly, or he allows discussion while simultaneously ignoring it, at which point people will likely judge his content based primarily on the associated comments of anonymous douchebags, left unchecked.
Meanwhile, much like hoping [random famous person on Twitter] will notice your response to her tweet, you’re not really engaging in a discussion or a conversation anyway, you’re living vicariously through the hope that your comment will somehow stand out from the hundreds or thousands of other people all driven by the same futile hope, while being overshadowed by those who are willing to say something horrible to achieve that goal.
I certainly don’t want to read that sort of thing, so I can’t imagine why he’d want to moderate it.
