Whatever gets clicks, irrespective of underlying facts

Summary: Flamebait and clickbait 'journalism' dooms whatever credibility media has left; Linux and GNU both suffer from that 'tl;dr' (too long, did not research) culture too

"Linux 5.5 RC5 is Out, But Media is More Interested in ‘Pure Garbage’" as we've put it in the latest Daily Links. The term ‘Pure Garbage’ is not obscene and it's the sincere view that came from Torvalds, who also openly bemoans the media cherry-picking only his outbursts and bad words. This latest clickbait journalism came from Phoronix, which was in turn cited by Slashdot, causing a bunch of more publications to follow suit (full chronology here.

As we explained some months ago, the mainstream (corporate) media seems to ignore criminals (or their words) and instead paint as "bad boys" a bunch of people who simply use terms lots of us occasionally use, e.g. "garbage" and "crap". This isn't fair to Torvalds and it is an insult to the already-dying occupation occasionally known as "journalism".

"This isn't fair to Torvalds and it is an insult to the already-dying occupation occasionally known as "journalism"."Sure, writing technical articles about Linux isn't easy. It's possible, but it's not easy. It takes time to learn, to research, to prepare, to fact-check with domain experts. So a lot of so-called 'journalists' either cover things they haven't a clue about or just focus on choice of words, making whole articles about ‘Pure Garbage’ (in the headline) without actually studying the code or offering some technical insight. This is why the so-called 'media' is dying and people won't trust it. This is the kind of irresponsible crap that caused Torvalds to take a break for a month and caused Stallman to step down (MIT and FSF) under great pressure. ⬆