- “I must say I was bothered only slightly by the fact that our treatment of the Apple announcement - like dozens of other newspapers across the continent - looked like an outright ad for the company,” writes Paul Berton, editor-in-chief of Canada’s London Free Press, just down the road from the University of Waterloo.
Super-star monopolist Bill Gates had honoured the UoW by dropping in during his school recruitment tour. After all, Canada is a part of the US of A.
But back to Apple, “I knew our readers would be interested,” states Berton who earlier says Apple boss Steve Jobs and Gates are “modern Messiahs”.
“In Judaism, the Messiah (מָשִׁיחַ "anointed one", Standard Hebrew Mašíaḥ, Tiberian Hebrew Māšîªḥ) initially meant any person who was anointed by God.” Says the Wikipedia. “In English today, it is used in two major contexts: the anticipated savior of the Jews, and one who is anticipated as, regarded as, or professes to be a savior or liberator.”
Jobs and Gates as liberators, eh? But read on.
Berton wasn’t bothered that a report looked like an ad because, “We must sell news-papers to survive and that means staying relevant to what people are talking about,” he says. “And these days, at least, people always seem to be talking about the latest technological gadgets. And when people talk about technology, they're really talking about the future. And because the future is catching us all more rapidly each day, it is an increasingly hot topic.”
Hard-core thieves However, Berton should be bothered, and seriously so, as should the “dozens of other newspapers across the continent”.
Major print and electronic media now routinely report by press release. This allows shareholder-controlled international enterprises, with no real credibility and no interest whatsoever in a balanced point of view, to release highly distorted ‘reports’ and to see them virtually re-published by such as the Globe and Mail and the Canadian Press (CP).
Gates wants to recruit Canadian students but, How about a little piracy before that computer class? asks the headline to a recent Globe and Mail story which goes on to parrot an assertion that half of Canada's university and college students are hard-core thieves bent on "stealing" music, movies and computer programs.
And, a 'study', from CAAST [Canadian Alliance Against Software Theft, a clone of America’s Business Software Alliance, owned by Microsoft, et al] found, "almost two-thirds of computer science students, who are preparing for careers in programming and software development, pirate software, compared with 46 per cent of students in other fields of study,” says the Globe and Mail.
Nowhere in the story is there any attempt to balance these outrageous claims with input from students, universities or indeed from anyone else. The self-serving CAAST 'survey' is allowed to stand alone and uncontested.
Cheating on exams and stealing clothing In another story, "Canadians between 12 and 24 years of age are responsible for 78 per cent of illegal music downloading, even though they make up just 21 per cent of the population,” the Canadian Press reports, quoting a CRIA (Canadian Recording Industry Association) survey as though it had emanated from a reliable source. “Canadians between the ages of 18 and 29 are much more willing than other age groups to make illegal copies of software programs, cheat on exams or even shoplift,” said different poll.
“Nearly 27 per cent of younger people surveyed said they would consider cheating on a test or exam, compared with 10 per cent of the general population” and, “Of those asked, six per cent of younger Canadians said they would leave a store without paying for a piece of clothing, compared with two per cent of the population at large”.
In other words, people who don’t buy ‘product’ from the CRIA’s owners, EMI, Vivendi Universal, Warner and Sony BMG, none of whom have a significant presence in Canada, are also likely to be shop-lifters who cheat on exams and steal clothing.
A true nightmare Technology is indeed the future and Jobs and Gates are, "doing more than just talking about the future; they're controlling it," says the London Free Press' Berton, going on, “I discovered only this week that much of the writing I created in the 1990s and dutifully saved to my hard drive is now unreadable on modern computers because the software that created it on my antique machine at home is obsolete.
“And there's the rub: Bill Gates's message about the future this week might have been exciting for the technologically savvy among us, but for others, it is a true nightmare.”
It is a true nightmare. But for them, not us, because p2p means de-centralized and that, in turn, means for the first time in history, you and I, not the lamescream media, control the flow of news and information.
Offline, 'local' newspapers and radio and tv stations are taking over from the corporate-controlled media and online, thanks to peer-to-peer technologies, for the first time in history, information is free to anyone who wants to find it.
It's called progress.
Jon Newton -
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win - Mohandas Gandhi
Tired of being treated like a criminal? They depend on you, not the other way around.Don't buy their 'product'. Do bug your local political representatives. Use emails, snail-mail, phone calls, faxes, IM, stop them in the street, blog. And if you're into organizing, organize petitions, organize demonstrations and then turn up on your local political rep's doorstep, making sure you've contacted your local tv/radio station/newspaper in advance.
See:- London Free Press - The 'future' is always news, October 15, 2005 dropping in - Bill Gates - Microsoft recruiter, October 13, 2005 Globe and Mail - Thieving Canadian students, August 9, 2005 Canadian Press - Canadians are thieves: CRIA, September 29, 2005
