Apple and the Media

I argued in this post that Apple's French problem seemed to be a much bigger problem because of the way the company was being reported in the media worldwide.

Today, I came across Leander Kahney's Wired Column "Are Apple's Customers Rebelling?". He has noticed much the same as me. Perhaps we're both paranoid as (overzealous) defenders of the Apple faith, though Leander is not afraid to attack Apple when he sees fit. Leander's point is that Apple gets lots of good publicity on the upside, but it seems it can also get lots of publicity on the downside too - way out of proportion to the scale of the problem, or next to a competitor with a similar problem. We (supporters) perhaps shouldn't be too defensive, and accept that for the good there is also the bad, however unreasonable.

But I'd like to pick up on something in Leander's article that he doesn't comment on but that I think is noteworthy. He mentions three negative articles about Apple in the press. The common theme is that all originated in the UK - The Telegraph, The BBC and The Scotsman (he forgot to mention the Mail on Sunday also originated the attack on one of Apple's manufacturers who also manufacture for Dell and HP). As someone who is not a particular fan of the UK press, is there something in this? Is this just another instance of our press taking the underdog, building it up, then attempting to destroy it? I don't believe it's just that our press only takes one or two anecdotes and happily reports that as scientific FACT (eg MMR Vaccine/autism). There is something cultural at work in our country and embedded in the media that means we never allow ourselves to enjoy success or let success flourish. Whether it's a football player (Wayne Rooney standup), cricket team, athlete, business person, politician or company, we have a tendency here to build them up and take perverse pleasure in bringing them down. This may be a worthy attribute at times and used in the right way, but very often we don't build people up or bring them down for the right reasons (Wayne Rooney stand up again).

Is it British fair play at work - checks and balances coming in to operation? Or, is it that great British "Chip-on-the-Shoulder" mentality? Or is it just cheap, simplistic, opportunistic, journalism?

Back to Apple. While they seem to have come in for some heat in this country, I have seen considerably less reporting here of Dell's travails. The exploding laptop seems to dwarf any technical issue that has allegedly plagued Macs/iPods, yet has been little-reported in the mainstream UK press to my knowledge. Furthermore, some other Dell problems such as Customer Service and with the Office of Fair Trading in the UK itself seem to get little attention here. Neither has their (disappointing) financial and market share performance been reported in a big way in the UK except in the Financial Times. Yet, next week, Apple's Q3 figures will be announced and a flat iPod number will undoubtedly be picked on here as heralding another pointer to the "end of the iPod phenomenon". The quality, price, service and so forth of Dell in the UK is more of an issue to the average UK consumer than Apple's while the respective market shares are around a 4:1 ratio. Of course, an exploding laptop story is arguably as unfair on Dell as Apple because it is such an isolated incident. But I don't think for one minute, the press adjudged that as the reason not to run with it. And, if not Dell, what about Sony? They have had more than their fair share of disaster stories in the last year, but again never seems to register on the UK mainstream press radar screen as significantly as even a minor Apple faux-pas (Sony's proprietary ATRAC, ConnectMusic Store, and of course the Rootkit shenanigans for example are far more evil than anything Apple is accused of).

Now, perhaps I can goad our occasional commentor Charles to stop by and defend the UK journalistic profession that I so enjoy having a go at. If it is just simply the reverse of the iPod halo effect then why does it seem a preponderance of the negative Apple stories originate in the UK?

Postscript and Disclosure: I have today gone out and bought 200 shares of Apple into my US IRA retirement account. I think it important to mention that, while also setting myself up beautifully for those of you who wish to come back and taunt me for my foolishness, beginning as early as next week's Q3 financials! I now have 600 shares - the earlier 400 were bought, believe it or not, the day after October 1987's Black Monday at an effective price of $9.75 and have since been all over the place!

Tags: Apple, Wired, CultofMac