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from the poking-the-bear-with-a-sharply-pointed-stick dept.
How CNET got banned by Google:
[...] [Elinor Mills] started [at CNET] in 2005 with arguably the hottest beat: internet companies, primarily rising star Google, and Yahoo, which was losing the internet search battle. I'd met Google co-founder Sergey Brin in 1999 when he gave me a desk-side demo of the simple and fast Google search site. By the mid-aughts, the company had come a long way, going public in 2004. The hugely popular Google search was raking in ad revenue, but the fact that Google knew all of our web searches and the content of Gmails had some people worried about privacy risks. I decided that for my first big feature in my new job I'd do a deep dive into Google's services to see if the concerns were justified. The resulting article -- published Aug. 3, 2005, under the headline Google balances privacy, reach -- would be the high-water mark of my journalism career. It certainly wasn't a wash for Google, either. The company's extreme reaction to my story prompted widespread criticism, led to a mini backlash and served as a case study in how not to deal with the media over perceived bad press.
[...] After I pitched the story to my editor, Jim Kerstetter, I spent a month researching and reporting the ins and outs of Google's products and policies, trying to understand what data the company collected and how that info was used. [...] As I was starting to write the article, News Editor Scott Ard stopped by my desk. With a mischievous glint in his eye, he suggested that I google Schmidt to see what types of information I could find.
The linked article is well worth reading, especially on how NOT to deal with the press!
(Score: 1, Disagree) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 07 2020, @09:45PM (1 child)
If you think that all newspapers and other media are "in cahoots" you're mad. I've worked for small newspapers. It's chaos, not massaged messaging. Yes, I fully believe that Murdoch-owned might have some bad policies, which dictate what opinions are OK to present, and what facts. But the "small group of power players" that you imagine doesn't exist outside of media conglomerates.
Now, are media conglomerates bad, because they can (and in Murdoch and other cases, do) force perspectives? Yes. But if you think that all media is controlled in such a way, then you're into lizard-people fantasyland.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 07 2020, @11:01PM
How much coverage of politics can a small newspaper muster? For the most part, they'll buy stories from the AP, who are definitely part of the conglomerate.
You also have True Believer reporters that meet to agree on the political line to take, regardless of what the paper's owners want.
All in all, I think the oligarchs owning the media are quite happy with keeping the chattering masses twittering, because even while keeping the people at each other throats and Donald Trump getting reelected, their ultimate goals are being catered to.