Summary: CBS continues to be infested with Microsoft staff past and present (this time Dave Johnson) and the bias in output is quite revealing
PROPAGANDA giant CBS (notoriously selling to the public wars of conquest and mass surveillance) has been a target of our criticism also because it hires people who have worked or are still working for Microsoft to cover Microsoft positively and slam Microsoft's competition. It's not news, it's advertising or agenda, if not propaganda.
Microsoft boosters are everywhere at CBS, with several in CNET and several in ZDNet; some are still Microsoft employees, not former employees. They are attacking Microsoft rivals and planting PR for Microsoft. Later on when they chat to me in Twitter they still pretend to be "objective". They don't say much; they just know they got caught in a conflict of interest.
Anyway, CBS has apparently just hired yet another (there are many more) "former" Softer to put
Microsoft puff pieces disguised as articles. This guy, Dave Johnson, works neither in CNET nor ZDNet (CBS-owned) but more directly writes for CBS sites. There are quite a few articles like this one and it's an epidemic that ought to raise concerns and draw criticism. Watch
his stream of Microsoft propaganda (even vapourware at the moment).
Meanwhile it's reported that Microsoft paid almost half a billion dollars for NFL to pretend to endorse Microsoft (advertisement disguised as recommendation), but even
this has not worked like Microsoft hoped. As
TechDirt (among other publications) put it, "Marketing Failure: Microsoft Pays NFL To Use Its Surface Tablets -- And People Still Call Them 'iPad-Like Tools'":
Over at The Verge, Vlad Savov has an amusing post about how NFL announcers this weekend referred to the sideline tablets that players are using as "iPad-like tools." Microsoft Surface tablets are being allowed on the sidelines as part of a $400 million deal between Microsoft and the NFL. And Microsoft is promoting the Surface as "the official tablet of the NFL." And, in the end, all anyone remembers is that it's an "iPad-like tool." I wonder if the guy who signed that deal for Microsoft has lined up a new job yet...
There have been quite a few articles like this one.
Embedded advertisements or fake endorsements are only some of the tools in Microsoft's arsenal of
AstroTurfing tools,
used by proxy much of the time. But again, what CBS is doing is much worse than most. It's corrupt means of providing what CBS pretends to be "news".
CBS is not news; neither in politics nor in technology. It needs to be shunned. It's corporate press, not news.
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