American media is complicit in an immoral propaganda campaign against China. Now that 2 Chinese officials are dead over the fiasco, the Vice President of Mattel admits that the news was all lies. “The vast majority of those products that were recalled were the result of a design flaw in Mattel’s design, not through a manufacturing flaw in China’s manufacturers.” It’s a bad day indeed for America when the VP of a toy company comes across as being more honest and transparent than the American media.

2007-11-30: another industry that deserves to, and will, die.

Now I want to highlight the subscription offers that magazines send through the mail. They’re full of lies. Here’s one I got today, which I’ve taken the liberty of annotating:

2013-03-28: when legacy media feeds technopanic you gotta wonder about ulterior motives. creating fear to stave off christensen style obsolescence?

What’s not OK is a company trying to scare the internet’s residents thinking they’re the residents of Dresden in order to drum up business. There are plenty of scary things, people, and plots online. There are plenty of bad guys. There are plenty of attacks. There will be plenty more. If you’re in the anti-hacker business, business has no signs of slowing down. So if your product is worth a damn, you shouldn’t have to lie to the internet to sell it. Don’t believe the hype.

2014-02-10:

The gardener used a “lawn mower” to “mow” the lawn.

technopanic at moribund organizations like the NYT runs very deep indeed.
2019-06-12:

Yes, the world has changed. But the NYT seems to think that the government should now just force the internet companies to hand over money after their own members spent years twiddling their thumbs and squandering any attempt to build up loyal followings and sustainable business models. It’s not easy to keep a media business sustainable these days, but so much of it has to do with those companies refusing to recognize how the internet was changing the business, and how to take advantage of those changes.