muckrights-sans-merde
bonum fabula frat
### muckrights-does-pr---not-reporting-or-journalism
originally "Techrights Does Reporting, Not Clickbait or Paid-for Spam"
http://techrights.org/2021/05/22/say-no-to-paid-for-spam/
*originally posted:* may 2021
muckrights probably used to do reporting...
> THE state of journalism is in general appalling, no matter where one looks. Yes, no matter the language/country, no matter the topic, no matter the authors… although there are still some exceptions.
thats not disputed, but muckrights is no exception.
> The problem isn’t limited to “tech” or to “Linux”; it would be wrong to frame it that way. Part of the issue is lack of investment/funding — a subject we wrote about many times over the years. It’s a lot easier and faster to just burp out some shallow ‘article’ based on something a Public Relations department produced
which is practically whats being done at muckrights...
> using its corporate budget; sometimes articles in the media get directly sponsored by the corporations they cover (or sponsored less directly, e.g. with advertising contracts). The end goal and the actual outcome are the same; it’s not journalism.
neither is muckrights.
of course the funding takes the long way around (and none of it goes to muckrights of course)
typically it goes (something) like this:
you poor suckers > corporations > pr agencies > "news"
with muckrights it goes more like this:
you poor suckers > corporations and government grants > pr agencies > ngos > muckrights > "news"
its a sad state of affairs, but who really benefits? the corporations.
> Read, Verify, Analyse, Only then start typing
indeed, theres no more solid foundation for your bullshit than a big bunch of facts. every good lie contains a kernel of truth!
> Investigative journalism takes a very long time.
so can building a reputation strong enough to sell out with.
> Some of the subjects we cover here I’ve known very well for decades
he admits he knows better (im working on proving it, but at least we agree he knows better)
> and I can refine my arguments over time.
but he wont.
> Critical skills help.
when youre reading muckrights.
> Some have dubbed this “scientific journalism”
these are probably the same people that dubbed the "DO NOT WANT!" star wars bootleg, and the english in countless kung fu movies.
ron is probably going to try to make this out to be some kind of ethnic thing, but that takes about half a second to dismantle-- im talking about really, really bad english. ron and i both know plenty of asians who speak better english than the average westerner; we arent talking about them, we are talking about the individuals who actually do (comically) TERRIBLE dubbing; not the entire race they belong to. you have to add these disclaimers sometimes, because ron reads what he WANTS to read.
i also knew a woman from lesotho who spoke three languages (her english was practically indistinguishable from american, though lesotho is british) and whose accent was eleven times easier to understand than mark shuttleworths, but whatever.
> because it involves assessing what is right and what is wrong, not “two side-ism” or fake “balance”
which are completely different approaches to pr.
muckrights prefers the "make shit up and have a thinly-veiled bias thats too heavy to transport in the back seat of your car" approach-- but it wasnt always this bad.
> the job of journalism isn’t just to give a voice to two sides but to speak to both and then assess who is right and who is wrong (or less right), then report the conclusions. That’s journalism.
or the justice system-- and you know how well that works out in practice-- partly due to extremely heavy bias.
> Over the past few weeks I spent over 30 hours studying the Freenode situation;
hes spent a lot of that schmoozing the owner. i dont believe hes bothered talking to the other people, (i dont really blame him for that, but if we are being "scientific" it might help to at least collect the data properly) but a number of people in irc have tried to explain the other side, which he has waved away the entire time.
in other words, he starts out with a very obvious bias and sticks to it, and calls it "studying the freenode situation". in real science, this is called cherry picking data. at muckrights, its called journalism.
i dont care that muckrights isnt formal or scientific about everything, but lets not drop a steamy load of bullshit on top and tell people its whipped cream and a cherry.
> it’s still an ongoing investigation,
which really never started...
> but we’ve pretty much made our mind
before starting...
> based on available material from both sides.
(but mostly the side thats most convenient and self-serving).
people are going to think i have a huge problem with the conclusion. that would be overstating things (but then muckrights does that quite a lot too). i have mild reservations about the choice i already knew muckrights was going to make from the beginning.
i already took issue with the fact that the entire process was / is / has already proven itself to be bullshit. we are in the justification phase now.
> Doing journalism doesn’t take a degree in journalism
just ask a journalist!
> “professional journalism” typically means receiving a salary for writing in rich people’s rags.
in the past, ron covered things like bribery of the press and mainstream "journalism". i have no problem with that, except that the same processes sometimes corrupt rons "sources" too. and if theyre not DIRECTLY with a pr firm or a mainstream publication, he pretty much just relies on his existing bias to decide who to trust.
this is ALWAYS what he does. in the past, his bias JUST HAPPENED to overlap more with honest people. that bias is the same-- the roster of players and the circumstances (the general landscape) have changed dramatically, but the bias has not.
all in all, thats not great for muckrights. or its audience.
> Well, journalism is a lot of work and very hard work.
its sort of like bodybuilding, except most of the resistance comes from keyboard springs and comments on twitter. or people making up a lot of bullshit, like pr people do.
> Because it can take 10 hours to study and then prepare a piece
or really: schmooze with people, use a search engine and make a cup of tea
> which takes less than 10 minutes to read. But that’s what it takes to properly inform people.
in fairness, he used to do that-- inform people-- albeit incidentally.
> Sites that barely have any readers see that as an unworthy investment of time.
i dont know if thats intended as a swipe at his critics, but either way its simply not true.
i barely have any readers (its kind of a niche topic, really) and i spent an ACTUAL 30 hours (more in a moment) doing research that resulted in a PROPORTIONAL amount of data being put together. this isnt data you can simply collect in an automated way either-- or it would have taken at most 5-10 hours. and there would be MORE data from it.
muckrights (even the author of the article im making fun of now) had the audacity to try to borrow credit for that research, which he had NO PART IN other than pasting it into his silly website.
if he expects you to believe he spent THIRTY HOURS doing "research" on the freenode situation, then he got ripped off in terms of the results. he could have learned as much as he posted about it doing 5 hours of research and spending the other 25 officiating a nationwide belching competition.
if 30 hours of work went into that, its like doing a phd course all for the sake of posting a single tweet as his thesis. dont make me laugh.
> We’re fortunate that here in this site we have many readers (over WWW, IPFS, Gemini and pure text/bulletins), so putting a ton of effort into studying topics is usually worth it.
i would agree. in fact id say for maybe the first 13 or 14 years, it was probably worth it.
> I didn’t study journalism, I studied software engineering and while doing my doctoral studies I started writing more and more; learning how to do journalism came from experience, not coursework.
what youre doing isnt journalism, sweetheart.
> Honest writing = Poetic justice
much appreciated.
> Going against the flow is sometimes needed
ron always follows the beat of his own drum, so everybody else can just try to keep up.
> especially when confronting big corporations with massive budget for ‘perception management’ campaigns
like the one that has taken over the same things ron used to cover with scepticism, but then stopped to schmooze with people who were already compromised...
> (that’s an actual term in the realm of PR, related to shaping of perceptions).
(ooh, behind the scenes footage).
> If journalism is done right and if hard evidence is presented, even injustices and falsehoods can be combated.
which is pretty hilarious coming from someone whose falsehoods can be PROVEN, who no longer combats injustices-- just waves his hands and says "ooh, ibm are nazis!"
its a shame that all that software engineering at uni hasnt given him the skills to try to get away from those mean ibm nazis. i dont like them either, thats why i tried to get away from them and advocated people also try to do so-- which ron started smearing me for.
lesson learned:
calling ibm nazis = "combating injustices".
actually trying to get away from ibm = "masturbating monkeys" (he said it, not me).
then again, a lot of engineers (even good ones) will be happy to tell you they know fuck-all about computers, and its true. a lot of software engineers know even LESS about computers, but only some of them realise this. so its not really fair to expect rons studies to translate into anything practical-- to computing, or to activism. or to research.
im not saying that studying software engineering necessarily PREVENTS you from doing something worthwhile with computers, only that it doesnt always help. this holds just as true for the most relevant example here.
> In the case of Freenode we’ve taken a look at what actually happened [1, 2] (owner locked out by 2FA) before leaping to any rushed conclusions.
he spent most of his time ignoring and dismissing andrew lees critics and letting lee explain everything to him.
i would have done NEARLY the same thing-- most of his critics dont interest me at all. i would state this bias openly, and let people know that if they want to hear the corporate shill side of the story, theres always a bunch of shit on github.
but its not very scientific, and neither is what doctor ron is doing.
the funny thing about admitting your biases is that even when your "research" is partly bullshit, people can make informed decisions about what amounts to an honest (if sometimes partly lacking) portrayal of it. now, perhaps im not giving myself enough credit here. though i dont want to go too far like ron does, and give myself too much.
> We feel gratified to see that our reporting turned out to be accurate or at least more balanced than most.
watch out for that roy-al we, its how he borrows credit for things he didnt research OR write, which he then uses to speak for the author (and by "for" i mean "against", regarding data ron himself has done ZERO research on).
> This new video, sent to us by an associate this morning, correctly points out that a lot of today’s ‘news’ is just spam/fluff/paid-for cruft, often composed by tweaking press releases, with authors who have no clue whatsoever what they ‘write’ about…
spot the fallacy. what being IMPLIED here (and hardly for the first time) is that if youre not getting paid, you can be trusted not to bullshit people.
so anybody who opens a twitter account and isnt getting paid to do it-- you can trust what theyre saying, folks.
i mean, there was all that other stuff about how he didnt study journalism and how he practiced and really spent 30 hours (bullshit) seriously looking into this situation, but not being paid doesnt mean that doesnt amount to a lot of bullshit either.
this guy lies, and all the science in the world cant stop a liar from falsifying data until after the fact.
> and it wasn’t always this bad.
neither was muckrights.
> The person who made this video is a former insider, both in PR and in journalism (some defect from one to the other, i.e. becoming corporate media operatives or former journalists leveraging their credential/credibility to lie on behalf of corporations
basically what im saying here-- ron is a former de-facto-quasi-journalist who has sold out to pr now, but not for money-- he has his own reasons.
some people sell out just to suck up to someone they want to impress or gain favour with. ron seems to want to suck up to a lot of people...
incredibly, it almost sounds like im talking about the guy who runs the penguinshit foundation. except that guy is getting paid to suck up to people. ron is cheaper than that.
> sometimes using their connections to manipulate the media).
or just the audience. fortunately for readers of muckrights, THERE ARE NO INCENTIVES (other than cold hard cash bribes) to manipulate and bullshit people. none. muckrights is truly a public self-service, public circus-- public service.
> We saw two examples of this only hours ago; for instance, Boing Boing is now belittling Bill Gates scandals and abuses while CNBC helps distract from Microsoft complicity. Media operatives working overtime to save brands? We can see the authors’ names and recognise these. In several different publications in fact.
maybe later he will actually tell you those names, but while muckrights used to do that more often it now waffles back and forth between pretending that isnt (ever?) necessary, and then doing it to make a point.
basically its all on a whim now. today the coup that started two years ago doesnt matter anymore, though the minute it overlaps with his freenode stories we start talking about the same coup that was irrelevant when they were simply doing a netsplit on the gnu project.
net.split on the gnu project itself: irrelevant, insinuated ron.
net.split by same people on things like #gnu on irc: WHOA, HOLD THE PHONE!
seriously, this is how bullshit muckrights has become. also this research (once again) comes from rons community, not ron himself. hes done 30 hours of "research" but the actual cross references come from other (unnamed) people. i know who they are, but why doesnt ron tell you? maybe they asked to be anonymous? i dont think so, but lets leave them out by default.
what IS the oxford referencing citation style for irc chat? i know! ill ask someone on twitter...
this still isnt journalism though. its more like a fact-checking sweatshop (they dont mind, they lose nothing if they walk out and they arent depending on it for anything) where the checked facts are cherry-picked anyway...
> In CNBC and in prior employers Jordan Novet has been nothing short of a Microsoft operative looking to distract from Microsoft lies, crimes, and fraud. Now he helps cover up for Bill Gates too… it’s so shallow that it’s not hard to decipher the true objectives. This isn’t journalism but cheesy PR.
its also a false dichotomy. either youre LIKE cnbc or youre not full of fucking shit, and muckrights isnt cnbc, so there! thats why we mentioned the "other" so-called news people. theyre basically here to make muckrights look GOOD.
> We omit links as they would not contribute to this discussion.
"they" do that a lot. but the thing about links is-- occasionally citing your sources of information (when theyre not leaks, because obviously that wouldnt work) lets people go and check to see if youre full of shit or not.
and that definitely WOULD NOT contribute to his "discussion" (monologue. if it were a discussion, he might give a shit what other people think, too. but if he did, he might cherry-pick less).
the whole way ron has done this is (in terms of process, not necessarily in terms of his argument) is to act as if the two official narratives are the options, and to throw out the narrative we are all (myself included!) pretty sure is bullshit, then to go looking for evidence that the OTHER official narrative is honest.
thats a lot like pr.
if he wanted to do research, he would probably pay a little more attention to the side we BOTH think is full of shit, JUST TO SEE if they say ANYTHING thats useful to double-checking the official narrative of the side we trust (if only slightly) more, and try to get BOTH sides from a sceptical (but reasonable) point of view.
but that might actually take 30 hours, which is why ron pretends hes spent that long on it. but if he did, youd probably get more than the conclusion-driven tripe he shat out.
you could argue, correctly, that its more than the bullshit side deserves. and it probably is. but the reason you do it this way, is that even the side thats probably full of shit MIGHT have a point in there that is extremely useful to determining the validity of the OTHER narrative, which could ALSO be bullshit.
but muckrights is so busy cherry picking data, theyll never get to that part of the "investigation" even if they spent SIXTY "hours" doing "research" on this.
thats the problem with his approach. hes really just looking to (as i said he would) confirm his existing bias.
none of this means that freenode is in bad hands. my own bias is that freenode already sucked before-- the people LEAVING could be the reason it sucked, but that doesnt mean i trust the new person (arbitrarily? why?)
ive got lots of reasons to be sceptical, and ron (as he often does) has lots of reasons to cherry-pick and play to his own bias. for one, its what he generally does anyway. this isnt about informing the public; its about convincing the public that doing what ron does is the most ideal thing to do. (but again, thats pr).
but i said he was going to spend a lot of time justifying the decisions he already made prior to this, so lets get back to his "we" schtick:
> In the case of the above-mentioned video, Mr. Lunduke is not aware that ZDNet and Tech Republic are the same publisher (scroll down to the bottom of the pages of the latter). He calls them completely separate, but the opposite is true.
oh, lunduke is making a big deal of x != y when theyre related in a lot of ways that are more significant than the fact that theyre technically two different things? yeah, i hate it when people do that. its just as annoying as conflating things that are really different-- pretending theyre completely separate when theyre not. but then even if lunduke were aware, lunduke talks a lot of shit anyway. my guess is we are still doing the "list of entities that arent muckrights (proving muckrights is therefore journalism)" bit.
anyway, if that was business trivia for 500, those points are yours.
> That former news site is now owned and run by a marketing company funded by IBM, Microsoft, and the Linux Foundation (funded in turn by such companies)
all of those companies now have (or until recently, had) strong ties to the fsf as well, but lets not get too close to his bias, or the smear campaigns in irc will start again. all part of the "scientific journalism", you know. i mean, human psychology is SORT of like a science, and what ARE abuse and smear campaigns, if not APPLIED psychology? we can therefore argue that at least, ron is doing APPLIED science. sort of.
> to post fluff and provocative lies.
"hello, mr. kettle, sir? theres a mr. pot on the line for you, he says its urgent..."
> While it’s understandable that people who write for a living wish and even need to make income somehow, lying to people or bombarding the media with garbage isn’t an ethical way to bring home the bacon.
doing it for free on the other hand, magically makes it an act of charity.
lets be clear about this, i agree that the corporate media is bullshit. its just-- you dont HAVE TO BE corporate media to be full of shit. i have it on very good authority that even some software engineers are full of shit too...
so why do i call what muckrights does now "pr"-- well, its pretty simple:
1. he now self-censors AND constructs bullshit narratives that serve the same "party lines" as the (literal) pr bullshitters that have taken over some of the most official organisations.
2. those same narratives ultimately serve the same corporations who have bought the media, but as long as they launder that through donations to an ngo ron is sucking up to, its cool.
3. he clearly puts his own agenda before facts; facts no longer have the same "chance" against his narrative that they used to.
4. he attacks critics who know him too well (and call him on this nonsense) with lies and absolute bullshit-- even people he trusted (or pretended to trust) for years.
5. he dismisses most or all information that would actually refine the quality of his narrative; the only thing he "refines" now is the rhetoric itself (and honestly, thats giving him too much credit-- his writing was far more credible when he "refined" it less, because it reeked less of an agenda before facts).
these are not "journalism tactics". theyre pr tactics. muckrights isnt doing journalism-- its doing pr.
muckrights probably isnt going to win any awards, like groklaw did.
it has the audacity to compare itself to groklaw-- but as far as i know, groklaw never exploited or abused its contributors the way muckrights has. also pamela jones wasnt known for just making shit up or pretending she had anything to do with research she had nothing to do with.
ron is still right about one thing-- you dont need a degree in journalism to do real journalism. but not being full of shit also helps.
=> https://muckrights-sans-merde.neocities.org