Everybody loves Apple?

Another story about the iPhone? Is the mainstream media - particularly The Guardian - biased towards Apple projects, such as Mac computers, iPods, and iPhones? Although many newspapers often jump on strange bandwagons, such as the Guardian's enthusiasm for Twitter, the Daily Express's continuing obsession with Princess Diana, or the Daily Mail's project to categorise everything into the world into those that cause cancer and those that cure cancer, suggestions of pro-Apple bias have been made for a number of years. Many journalists celebrate the charisma of Apple founder Steve Jobs, but there are other possible reasons for good treatment: the tactics of Apple's PRs, and that most journalists personally use Apple Macs.

Apple are notoriously touchy with journalists and publishers. They refused to talk to IT news website The Register for a long time, have sued several technology blogs, and banned all publisher John Wiley's books from their stores. Reasons to incur this wrath included: mocking Apple boss Steve Jobs, producing a book about him, and reporting on upcoming products.

Historically Macs have been prevalent in newsrooms even in the company's 1990s doldrums, running software such as Quark used for newspaper and magazine production. Macs have their pros and cons - they are easy to use and have good software for many creative and design tasks, but have less software in other areas (particularly games). They can't interface with as much hardware - mobile phones, cameras, MP3 players, etc - as Microsoft Windows, due largely to the decisions of hardware manufacturers about what to support (although they do support iPods and iPhones), and they cost more than systems for Windows or Linux. In image terms, Apple have strong product design, but they lack the moral superiority of free software such as Linux, which appeals to many serious programmers for its underlying philosophy as much as for its power, configurability, and cheapness. Microsoft's business practices drove many morally-based purchasers away (although Apple's transgressions are less widely known). For the needs of a journalist, an Apple Mac might be ideal.

Occasionally a few journalists start to worry about this. The first seeds of dissent sprouted in late 2005 when Apple's initial iPod success was followed by a series of products of less than brilliant innovation, particularly the first video iPod - which came long after products from rival companies and had a tiny screen and minimal battery life (see below). In early 2009, when it turned out Apple had lied about boss Steve Jobs's health and he was actually seriously ill, there was another round of criticism.

One of the first people to discuss this was columnist John C Dvorak in August 2005, who compared the treatment of Apple with that of Microsoft:

As big and as important as Microsoft is, the coverage of the company is quite mediocre. This is particularly true in the mainstream press. The reason for this is that today's newspaper and magazine tech writers know little about computers and are all Mac users. [...]

The newsroom editors are generally so out of touch that they can't see this bias. Besides, they use Macs too. There are entire newsrooms, such as the one at Forbes, that consist entirely of Macintoshes. [...]

I often confront these guys with this assertion, and they [...] all say that they use a Mac "because it is better."

Daniel Lyons in January 2009 complained that the media failed to pursue stories about Steve Jobs's health problems:

The fact is, in the eyes of the media, Apple is the corporate equivalent of Barack Obama—a company that can do no wrong. [...]

But some of my colleagues in the media have made a Faustian bargain with Apple. In exchange for super-special access to Jobs, they tacitly agree not to criticize the company or even to say things it doesn't like. [...]

Apple's entire corporate culture is built on secrecy, and I mean crazy, CIA-style secrecy[...]. Imagine what it might be like if the Church of Scientology went into the consumer electronics business

He also criticised Apple's PR machine in strong terms:

This is a company whose idea of "corporate communications" mostly involves picking up the phone and saying "No comment." Or sometimes they'll pick up the phone and just repeat the same meaningless sentence, over and over again, no matter what question you ask them. I'm not kidding. They really do that. And of course a lot of the time they just don't return phone calls at all.

This may seem incredible, even by the standards of telephone customer service people, but similar claims have come from The Register:

Apple corporate has turned these talented PR professionals into little more than call center workers who repeat the same, frustrating phrases over and over again, refusing to activate anything resembling human emotion or intellect. This has to be dehumanizing, and I suspect many of the PR staff seek therapy just so they can drive to Cupertino each morning.

It is little wonder that journalists whose careers depend on good sources in the industry and access to new technology will try and be nice to these fearsome PR robots.

Many critics of bias focus on over-enthusiastic reports of new iPhones and iPods. As already mentioned, these are almost the only mobile phones and media players that are fully supported on journalists' Apple Macs; Samsung, Motorola, or Nokia phones generally come with Windows-only software. CNet complained in November 2008:

the vast majority of journalists use Macs to write their stories and have a deep-seated love for Apple products. [...] When was the last time you saw the entire technology field stop and wait for an announcement from any other company besides Apple?

(CNet is no stranger at annoying big companies; Google once refused to speak to them for a year: report and the story that started it.)

The 2005 video iPod announcement provoked some questions from journalists, such as Jack Shafer in Slate, October 2005

The pairing of the V-iPod announcement with news that the iTunes store will sell Desperate Housewives and other ABC fare drove the story to Page One of USA Today and onto the biz fronts of the Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the New York Times. [...]

Apple manipulates several narratives to continue to make its products interesting fodder for journalists. One is the never-ending story of mad genius Steve Jobs, who would be great copy if he were only the night manager of a Domino's pizza joint. The next is Apple's perpetual role as scrappy underdog—reporters love cheerleading for the underdog without ever pausing to explore why it isn't the overdog.

(Slate was at one time owned by Microsoft, but they had sold it by then.)

2005 was probably the high-point of Apple hysteria and bias. Another example: on 22 September 2005, the Guardian published almost the only positive review of the long-forgotten Apple/Motorola ROKR phone on the exact same day as they published an exclusive interview with Apple boss Steve Jobs. Following this, the Guardian featured in TV ads for the iPhone, where users were shown surfing to the newspaper's website, without the long loading times that the javascript- and ad-heavy web pages caused especially on first-generation iPhones.

Stephen Fry occasionally writes on consumer electronics for the Gardian, and one of Apple's biggest fans, with a close relation to the firm's PR machine. The corporation flew him over to Apple's headquarters to try it out, giving him a pre-release model, and in return received Fry's typically rhapsodic prose. (Time, MacWorld) This is no different to the way corporations woo other journalists, but Fry is not a young staffer on a technology website who might be expected to fall for such tricks.

There is also one particular story of pro-Apple bias which indicates the editorial standards of newspapers' technology desks. In the summer of 2009 readers noticed that the New York Times was employing as a technology journalist David Pogue, who also wrote several books on Apple products, and who gave Apple's products good reviews. Although he was not paid by Apple, there were suggestions of self-interest.

The Times's Public Editor summarised the problem:

Two Thursdays ago [27 August 2009], two of Pogue's interests seemed to collide. In his Times column, he gave a glowing review to Snow Leopard, Apple's new operating system for Macs. At the same time, he was writing a "Missing Manual" [part of a season of books] on Snow Leopard — two, actually — already available for pre-order on Amazon. It is no intended knock on Pogue's integrity — he has panned Apple products and praised those of competitors — to point out that the review put him in the kind of conflict-of-interest situation that The Times regularly calls others to account for: doctors with a financial interest in the drugs they recommend, or a presidential adviser whose clients have a direct interest in certain legislation. In this case, the better Snow Leopard sells, presumably the better Pogue's "Missing Manual" on how to use it will sell.

Later Pogue admitted that Snow Leopard, the OS he had praised so highly, was full of bugs and often crashed. The New York Times - one of the world's most respected newspapers - saw a conflict of interest but refused to take any action to stop it.

The always self-questioning BBC have given the pro-Apple bias some consideration. In 2008 Jeremy Hillman discussed its coverage of the iPhone 3G (not the original iPhone) launch which he claimed was modest (getting radio and website coverage but not TV) and correctly proportioned.

On the other hand, many Apple fans have insisted that the media is anti-Apple; while this can hardly be justified with respect to iPhones and iPods, the media has sometimes paid less attention to Apple computers - but with Apple's tiny share of the PC market that is not too surprising.

What is needed is more substantial, perferably quantitative, analysis. In the absence of that, I did a quick search of the Guardian's archives today. "Apple" returned 16131 results, 2145 in 2009; "Microsoft" 13085 results, 1341 in 2009. Taking figures for 2009, that is 60% more coverage for Apple than Microsoft, despite turnover of $58bn for Microsoft (makers of Windows, the XBox, search engine Bing, and websites including Hotmail) against $34bn for Apple (makers of Mac computers, iPhones and iPods, and operators of the iTunes online store). iPhone got 1074 results against 305 for Nokia. Google (2640 results) and Twitter (3566) got more coverage, although those stories may have been bulked by journalists inviting people to Twitter comments or Google stuff.

(The Guardian's vast Twitter coverage is another topic; whether they are enthused by Twitter's usefulness for marketing, or someone there just really likes it, is unclear.)