A central cliché in the news-consuming audience is
the bloodthirsty media, pandering to the darker impulses of its
audience. A central cliché among reporters is the
bloodthirsty audience’s demand to be pandered to, and the
subsequent reward of those efforts with ratings and pageviews.
Dennis Powell looks at the issue of covering bad news about Linux
from a reporter’s perspective, using two recent stories about GNOME
and KDE as examples. At issue: Are Linux reporters here to
cheerlead? Does reporting bad news constitute endorsement of the
news? And why did a story about Red Hat turning its first profit
(in many ways representing Linux turning its first profit) get only
half the attention?
“Which story did readers think more important? Again,
it’s difficult to tell, but twice as many people read about the
disputes in KDE and GNOME as read about Red Hat’s profits, as of
six hours following the posting of the later piece. Twice as many
people posted comments to the dispute story, too, though most of
those were to condemn me, LinuxToday, or both, for having, in the
immortal cliché used in at least one of the talkbacks,
aired the projects’ dirty laundry, and for being happy the disputes
took place.First, I’m not happy the disputes took place. In the column that
was to have run today, I mentioned my pleasure in a theme developed
by Daniel M. Duley, known in the KDE community as Mosfet, who wrote
the Pixie application and who has been performing some very
attractive alpha-channel miracles. He is the longtime KDE developer
at the center of that dispute, about which more in due course.Second, it is utterly astonishing to me that people who are
forever going on about “free speech” and the like, which was
codified for the first time in the First Amendment to the
Constitution of the United States, would now suggest that a medium
whose purpose is to cover things Linux should not cover anything
inconveniently embarrassing or that casts a bad light on what they
wish people would believe, as they do, about Linux. This suggests
to me that these poor, real-life-less specimens are merely
conduits, who devote little or no time to thought and absolutely
none to independent thought — whose next original notion will be
their first. True Believers, Eric Hoffer called them. Miserable
whining cowards hiding, often, behind aliases and phony email
addresses, I call them, when I’m being polite. (People who pleasure
themselves while gazing at a jpeg of Madonna and don’t know that
it’s different from actually being with Madonna, which is
understandable because they lack the experience from which to draw
the distinction, when I’m not being polite.) Fortunately, they can
usually be safely ignored — what stock can one take in the views
of those for whom no respect is possible? But sometimes they get
loud enough and annoying enough that they need to be identified,
characterized, and very specifically disregarded. Consider it done.
“