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Starting in 2006, every March The Consumerist has held a Worst Company in America contest modeled on the March Madness college basketball tournaments. The 2014 champion was Comcast. But this year, there was almost total silence. No contest. No news on why the contest was not being held. No discussion at all. It's like almost every post about a 2015 WCIA contest is being deleted. That includes all of the Internet outside The Consumerist website. Very few articles or blog posts exist trumpeting the contest for 2015.
Has interest in the contest declined that precipitously? The contest certainly had problems, with the worst being that it was an unpopularity contest focused on bad service rather than a merit based contest that considered more factors about why a company might be bad, with many companies worse than EA not even being seeded, and entire industries being ignored. For instance, not one member of the mining industry has ever been seeded, despite their horrible records on safety and environmental damage, such as the 2010 Upper Big Branch Mine disaster that killed 29 miners, and the 2014 Elk River chemical spill that poisoned the water supply of 300,000 people. A difficulty is that mining companies are more ephemeral, routinely transferring most assets to the owners, then going bankrupt to evade having to pay for clean-ups. The same lack of seeding goes for the prison-industrial complex, the photo enforcement industry, and the still active military-industrial complex that President Eisenhower warned about in 1961.
Or is it that The Consumerist website is slipping, being taken over by corporate interests or perhaps just incompetents, given that they killed off their user base when they wiped user accounts and disabled posting for months? Is this a demonstration of the growing power of the corporate propaganda machine, which would surely like to censor all negative publicity?
This is also a demonstration of the fragility of websites, when they become a single point of failure for the user community they build.
(Score: 3, Informative) by bzipitidoo on Monday April 06 2015, @05:18PM
If anything, mainstream media is guilty of spinning, downplaying, or most of all simply ignoring the most damaging behavior that is routine for corporations. They only pile on when there is so much blood in the water that every shark within 100 miles has come and the slick can be seen from space.
Corporations and their leaders are powerful. The powerful have to be held accountable, held in check. It's not just industrial accidents and financial fraud we should be hearing more about. We should be seeing a constant drumbeat of news about excessive executive pay, until that is no longer a problem. We also should see lots of news about egregious contracts of the sort that many employment and most EULAs are. Employment contracts are notorious for non-compete clauses and work-for-hire provisions, and then there's the eroding of the 40 hour work week, H1B visa controversy, and leaning on employees to accept a 1099 arrangement rather than a salary with a W2 and all those pesky labor laws. This custom of overreaching in EULAs, demanding that users agree to things that are unfair and even illegal, in hopes that some will be fooled into accepting and obeying unenforceable terms, and of course the "shrinkwrap" part, springing the terms on the customers after they have paid, ought to be ended. One of the more interesting effects of this growth of legalese is that the Windows version of several libre software packages throw up this big wall of text that is actually only the GNU Public License, and demand that the users click a big "I agree" button before being allowed to continue. That is totally unnecessary, and should be stopped. As I understand it, you don't have to agree to anything just to use libre software. The GPL only comes into effect if you want to copy or modify the source code, which most users do not. Would be good to have interviews with some lawyers and executives who dream up that stuff and now want to expose it, or leaked documents about corporate strategy on those matters.
An event like the Worst Company in America contest is not just clickbait. Its part of a desperately needed system to restrain the powerful from anti-social behavior. Maybe WCIA wasn't very good, and it's time to retire it for something better. But what is better? I would prefer that the contest keep being run until such time as we as a society have tamed the corporate beast to such an extent that public expectations of corporate behavior are no longer cynical, because they are no longer anti-social as a matter of routine, and it is actually hard to fill the brackets. Occupy Wall Street had some modest accomplishments. The website blackout and defeat of PIPA and SOPA was one of the best moments for the public in recent times. Wikileaks caused a ruckus. But TPP is still alive and still secret. What else can be done?
(Score: 1) by mr_mischief on Monday April 06 2015, @07:35PM
Mainstream media is big corporations. What do you expect of them when it comes to talking about big corporations?