Why Media Entities Must Defend or Not Critique Word Salad

Executive Summary

• Executives often have false information they need to communicate that they present with a word salad.
• It is important that media entities maintain their access and income, not critique these word salads.

Introduction

If you have noticed that CEOs and other high-level executives seem to go unchallenged in interviews with IT media, you are right. This article will cover why media entities allow these powerful individuals to say whatever they want.

Our References for This Article

If you want to see our references for this article and related Brightwork articles, see this link.

How the Media System in the Internet Age Works

Media entities are highly compliant with powerful individuals and companies. There are several reasons for this.

1. Companies are usually a primary revenue stream for media entities. NBC and ABC, and other major networks depend upon oil companies, defense contractors for advertising income. This is why you will not see oil company shenanigans or defense procurement fraud on these networks. The same is true for IT media, where the largest vendors and consulting companies contributed to the bulk of advertising and paid placements to the IT media entity. This has become even more tilted towards the industry as readers only occasionally pay for the media they consume.
2. Companies are often the source of stories that readers want to read. By being able to “break” stories, which amounts to repeating what the companies say, the media entity solidifies its place as a relevant source in its respective space.

This means allowing companies to say whatever they want, no matter how illogical or inconsistent, without critique. It also means asking “softball” questions, which allows the company spokesperson to position the company and its products the way the company wants. If the treatment is not exactly as the company wants, the company can shut out the media entity and begin dealing with more compliant media entities.

Example of Coverage of SAP

As I covered in the article Extracting Meaning from Diginomica’s Interview with SAP CEO Christian Klein, in an article in Diginomica that interviewed SAP CEO Christian Klein, there was little logic. Christian repeatedly made statements that were really just word salads. Throughout all of the head-scratching comments by Christian, Denis Howlett, the writer or interviewer for Diginomica, never critiqued anything stated by Christian.

Let us review an example.

I just want to make sure that now in these partnerships, we try our best to make sure that we are in the lead when it comes to business model transformation, when it comes to talks about how to move the system landscape, the application layer in the cloud. And it’s also important that we position our platform there, as we cannot afford to lose the platform game either, as this is the platform which keeps our applications together, makes the integration work. And it’s of course also very important for the extension of our solution. So, this is something where I would like to draw a much clearer line going forward, because in the past, I feel we were not clear enough in some of these partnerships. – Christian Klein

This is a word salad. Furthermore, SAP does not have a platform. They sell applications. And for could, they pretend to offer a cloud. Still, in fact, they have their partners perform the hosting (i.e., not cloud) though something called the HANA Enterprise Cloud or HEC, as I cover in the article Our Comparison of SAP HEC with Virtustream Versus AWS Analysis.

Nothing is “built” on SAP’s platform (unless one wants to include refactoring applications that should not be refactored into ABAP and placing them in SAP). 

But again, nothing close to this fact-checking is performed by Diginomica. Media entities that get to speak to CEOs and other high-level executives do not challenge them. This is considered a “coup” for the media entity. Therefore, there is no stomach to confront them when the CEO or other high-level executive makes false statements or makes no sense, or are entirely inconsistent with what is known to be true or how the company actually functions.

How Media Entities are Forced to Sell Out

Here is the problem. How else is Diginomica supposed to make money? It can’t sell its magazine as it would have in the pre-Internet era. It can’t get much money from advertising because that has mostly been gobbled up by Google (you know, the company that does no evil). Media entities now have no other choice but to harvest their income from the industry side, which means that readers no longer have their interests represented. And you can’t harvest industry for income if you also fact check them and challenge their statements.

This is the point we have found repeatedly in analyzing a wide variety of IT media entities — each one of them is dependent upon industry for nearly all of their income.

An Example of Word Salad from Major Media

Because many US broadcast and print media entities in the US are aligned against the Republican party (Fox News, for example, is the opposite — aligned with the Republicans), much US media coverage is highly partisan. For example, each associated media entity only covers the transgressions of the opposing party.

This political alignment was the source of the Russiagate conspiracy proposed by Democrat-aligned media entities and by shows on these entities like one hosted by Chris Hayes. After the Russiagate conspiracy (that Putin controlled the US 2016 presidential election and that Trump was a Russian asset), was discredited, after the Department of Justice dropped their case against the Russian Troll Farm called Internet Research Agency after the latter showed up in court, and the DOJ had no case — media figures like Chris Hayes and Rachel Maddow have tried to pivot away from explaining why they supported the evidence-free conspiracy.

In the interview with The New Yorker, analyzed in Jimmy Dore’s video above, Jimmy Dore shows how Chris Hayes is allowed to get away with a word salad that amounted to the Democrat-aligned media being remotely controlled by Putin and Russia’s mind control. 

Conclusion

In the case of both major media and CEOs and high-level executives, the media system ensures that they can say any falsehood, any inconsistency, and not be held to account for their accuracy. To work in major media, one must be compliant with powerful entities, ensuring continual access to even false information.

In this way, a major function of media entities is to ensure continued access to privileged information and funding from the powerful.