Bonum Certa Men Certa

Media Coverage for Sale

Video download link | md5sum 6d6a7e954b1238ecf7acbbda58d75d39



Summary: Today we're highlighting a couple of new examples (there are many other examples which can be found any day of the year) demonstrating that the World Wide Web is like a corporate spamfarm in "news" clothing

THE past few days have been super-busy for personal reasons, so yesterday was the first day in a long time that no video was produced or published. Instead we prioritised keeping on top of the news (Daily Links) though hours ago we set aside two examples of bad media.



If you carefully examine the structure of TechRadar, a Linux-hostile site a lot of the time, you quickly see that it’s a Microsoft propaganda or AstroTurfing platform even when it covers something "ubuntu" or something “linux”… so you generally know where their funding comes from or who their clients are. The readers ("audience") are just a product they sell to their true clients.

Similarly, as we've seen before, "Red Hat is a sponsor of The New Stack," as it says at the bottom of the second example. The problem is, earlier today Red Hat's official site linked to this article about Red Hat, paid for by Red Hat itself. In other words, IBM buys articles about itself. This isn't how the media is supposed to work. Journalists cannot exercise independence because that's not how true journalism functions.

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