BusinessWeek: Media in lovefest with Apple, are reporters asking the hard questions?

20 years ago

“The historical record will show that the era of Apple computers bearing microprocessors from Intel began at 10:16 a.m. Pacific Standard Time on January 10, 2006,” Arik Hesseldahl writes for BusinessWeek. “That was the moment that the Associated Press issued the following one-sentence NewsAlert:”

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) Apple Computer Inc. CEO Steve Jobs unveils an iMac computer based on Intel Corp.’s chips, just six months after the historic partnership was announced between the two once-unlikely Silicon Valley bedfellows.

“It’s the first time in my memory that a product announcement by Steve Jobs has caused the AP to send an alert — especially since this development was fully expected. And it says a lot about the intensity of media attention Apple generates. When is the last time a NewsAlert went out based on the words of Michael Dell or Bill Gates? Clearly, the AP’s editors determined this news was important enough to warrant such action,” Hesseldahl writes. “Half the fun in covering Apple is covering the coverage of Apple. The argument has been made that we in the press are a little nuts about Apple. It’s a fact. The highs and lows of Jobs & Co. are so dramatic that the erudite prose practically writes itself. And I can’t help but think something is wrong with that.”

Hesseldahl writes, “Take the way Apple was treated in 1997, when it was beset by sagging sales, a profound lack of product direction, and the onslaught of Microsoft’s (MSFT) Windows. That summer Wired did a cover depicting the bleeding Apple logo surrounded by a crown of thorns with the headline “PRAY.” Brilliant in its honest execution and frank assessment of the situation, it was for Mac-lovers a low-water mark.”

“As great a company as Apple computer is — I’m often as guilty as anyone of falling for the hyperbole — the pointed, skeptical, analytical, dispassionate, and yes, uncomfortable questions about this unusually influential outfit and its unique, legendary, brilliant, and complicated chief don’t get asked often enough. And they should be, more often than they are now. Great companies deserve nothing less,” Hesseldahl writes.

Hesseldahl’s full article includes the question, “why only 1.25 million Mac sales for the quarter?”

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