Tim Worstall writes on Forbes.com about why there is so much coverage about Apple in the business news media.
Worstall writes, “Apple is the world’s most valuable company for example. It has, in the past decade, entirely revolutionised two parts of the consumer electronics business. Indeed, the smartphone, which the iPhone was the first decent implementation of, looks like becoming the fastest adopted technology ever in the history of the entire human species so far. Which sound like pretty good reasons to cover the company and its products really.
“However, it’s the implications of this point that tell us something deeper about the newspaper industry:
Charles Arthur is the Guardian’s technology editor, and in his role has written many, but by no means all, of the stories featuring Apple in the past year. He said: ‘The statistics show that people read about Apple stuff. If a story involves the company, it gets huge readership.”
“People tend to read the stories about Apple. Thus stories about Apple tend to get written. We could be superficial and say that it’s just about getting the clicks on the website (and we could go meta-superficial on the same point about this piece itself). Or we could point to a deeper truth about newspapers, indeed all media outlets, themselves.
“Far from media forming the mindset of the readers and viewers the various outlets chase the pre-formed opinions of the various possible audiences. People who watch Fox News don’t have views that you disagree with because Fox has told them so. Rather, there are people who have different views and Fox has decided to chase their custom in a manner that CBS, or PBS, has decided not to. Those two have decided to chase the patronage of people who think as you do. Please do insert any media outlet at all and any viewpoint here, for all are doing exactly the same thing. It really isn’t a matter of changing people’s attitudes, it is of pandering to them.”
Read more here.
