07.10.11
Novell Pays Ponemon Institute, LLC, to Help Generate Fake News
Summary: Larry Ponemon’s firm, which sells bias, helps Novell seed some favourable coverage in news sites following a paid-for ‘study’ and paid-for press release
THE MOVEMENT known as “sceptics” (or skeptics for the north Americans) has grown rather popular. It is associated with developing critical skills that are derived to an extent from science, encouraging people to tell apart fake news from real news and facts from fiction (including so-called ‘conspiracy theories’). Here at Techrights we encourage everyone to take a critical look and remember the role of PR agencies. The PR industry in the United States alone is said to have a turnover of over one trillion dollars. It’s that industry which tells unsuspecting members of the public what products are “good”, what foreign policies are “good”, which companies are “good”, and which people are “good”. Bill Gates, for example, spends over one million dollars per day on PR, i.e. telling the world how wonderful he and the Gates Foundation are. It’s a really massive industry generating bias and making deliberate deception “acceptable” (because “everyone’s doing it!”). It’s why a lot of sociopaths happen to be affluent, even if they are not genuinely clever.
“It’s a really massive industry generating bias and making deliberate deception “acceptable” (because “everyone’s doing it!”).”While it is rare to see companies targeting Novell (whose future is just a trademark possibly to be abandoned), these still rarely exist and the company still has those rare press releases, from Provo even (not Boston). This new one for example is based on some claims Novell paid someone to make as means of generating promotional pseudo-articles (pasted press release) and exaggerated claims that help Novell make sales. That last one says: “The average cost of compliance associated with storing unstructured data is $2.1 million per year, according to a report prepared by the Ponemon Institute for software firm Novell.”
Another one repeats the same claims, which Novell merely bought. It’s not real research, it is tainted.
The Ponemon Institute conducted the research for networking vendor Novell, to look at the storage, control and compliance challenges that derive from the proliferation of unstructured data such as documents, presentations and spreadsheets.
Watch this Novell propaganda spreading:
The Ponemon Institute, on behalf of networking and data management firm Novell, looked at the compliance costs of managing business data at 100 firms.
How were those 100 firms selected? Did Novell put any strings on the finding? Any incentive to tilt it in one direction or another (e.g. for future contracts)? No journalist seems to be questioning those claims, just reposting them. It’s pure laziness. This is no better than PR, like like this new “Novell Customer Success Story” which is totally within Novell’s control (just like the Vibe PR blitz in YouTube, as we noted before). Novell is just trying to inject its idealogy into articles as well as inject product names like “Novell Identity Manager” into articles like this one. If this is the state of today’s journalism (no research, no days taken for independent audit of claims), then we are seriously in a miserable state of affairs. News just becomes surrogate for PR and here in Techrights we fought against shallow coverage about Novell, which mostly echoed Novell’s PR rather than investigate. If there is something people can take away from this site, it will hopefully be critical skills. It’s not just about Novell and we have decent wiki pages on this subject. These can be generalised. Had journalists done their job properly (covering, not promoting), Microsoft would not get so far with racketeering and Novell would probably avoid a treasonous deal with Microsoft.
“News of the World” is dead today, after well over a century. What a testament of our times. █
