JOURNALISTS, not parrots

Summary: Despite it being crystal clear that the latest wave of Microsoft layoffs is international, the corporate media pretends it's limited to just two cities in one single state and that these layoffs are just routine and nothing out of the ordinary

The 'media' coverage regarding the latest Microsoft layoffs is, as expected, worse than disappointing. We just see a bunch of Microsoft PR reps (or Microsoft's media operative inside newsrooms), not reporting, and we've gives some examples with editorial comments in our latest Daily Links and in Tux Machines. Where's the actual research? One parrot parroting another parrot, parroting/citing Microsoft or a Microsoft spinner in a Microsoft-sponsored 'news' site?

What is the job of a reporter or the job of a journalist anyway? A journalist should expose to the public facts previously unknown, e.g. suppressed by the powerful, not a bunch of "tweets" or what some PR department issues in a media statement. Otherwise, there's no real value in the work. "That was the old way of journalism," my wife has just reminded me. Now they just wait to see "what's happening in TikTok, Facebook, Twitter, there's no investigation..."

It's not that hard to find/fish out the facts, especially with some budget that publishers used to allocate for such work. Phone Microsoft in London, then ask something like, "hi, it's John from The Times, do you have any layoffs this week? OK, thank you, bye." "Hallo, Microsoft Deutschland, [same routine]"... try to gather information this way. If they don't want to respond, then be clever.

One step up: "Can you DENY that you have layoffs this week?" Non-response means something is amiss. Be creative. And if they lie, report that too.

So far we've seen that aside from the "AI" spin they try to pretend this is some kind of normal or routine or annual thing (we saw those same lies in prior years). That's a lie. It's easy to disprove. They've shut down entire units. Look at the WARN pages for years such as 2010-2020. The latest post in Techrights was entitled "Media Already Lies About the Scale of Microsoft’s Latest Wave of Layoffs" because they only count the first batch in only two cities like it is the global total. The mainstream media wrote about it one hour ago. This one says "The Redmond-based tech giant on Monday disclosed the cuts, affecting 276 local employees, in a Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification filing Monday with state of Washington."

But we know there are more layoffs in other states, cities, countries, and continents. We also know they split the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) filings to make the numbers seem smaller. We showed an example of that yesterday. The article then says "Microsoft announced in January that it would lay off 10,000 workers globally, joining other companies in an industrywide headcount-cutting trend. Microsoft's reductions affected over 2,700 local employees."

The part about "10,000 workers globally" is false. They repeat the claims from Microsoft! Then, what they mean by "local employees" is just workers in Seattle, not Redmond (as in "Redmond-based tech giant") or even the United States as a whole. They get very basic facts wrong. Is this the best "professional journalism" can yield? Seems more like Microsoft propaganda/stenography, not journalism. ⬆