Enderle issues mea culpa – sort of

“I spend a lot of time, and I have to admit take a little pleasure in, pointing out hoaxes to others. So it is incredibly ironic and quite humbling to fall for a hoax myself,” Rob Enderle blogs for IT Business Edge.

MacDailyNews Take: You want a real business edge, IT? Get a Mac. In fact, Get a Bunch of Macs and throw out recycle those Windows PC. Oh, sorry, then most of you would be out of jobs! Silly us. Back to Enderle…

Enderle continues, “In my previous post, I got upset about what appeared to be a personal attack on Dan Lyons by Apple. Today I found out that Dan was trying to draw more attention to the Think Secret shutdown which, I agree, we should have all been more concerned about than we were. But Apple never actually went after Dan. I clearly was drinking way too much eggnog to see the joke for what it was.”

“Before the Internet, shutting down a publication covering a company as a result of talking about real facts would have been nearly impossible — but Apple did it in passing, which should have troubled more of us than it did. Granted, it seems that the owner of Think Secret is OK with this, but settlements are like this and often what folks say has more to do with the settlement terms than with what they really think,” Enderle writes. “With the coming of the .com age, we saw change… We moved, and many older reporters lament about this, from covering the facts to being sensational without a lot of regard for the facts.”

MacDailyNews Take: Mirror, Rob. Rob, mirror.

Enderle continues, “This is offset significantly by the number of small sites that cover topics, but were a company to aggressively go out and buy a lot of these small sites, shifting them to their purpose, it could control a substantial amount of opinion and, done right, might not have to disclose its ownership. This is why the Think Secret thing is kind of scary. We don’t know how often things like this happen because there would be every reason to not want to disclose the change. What if, instead of shutting the site down, Apple had taken it over?”

MacDailyNews Take: They’d probably have a lot better rumors.

Enderle continues, “Given sites that cover Apple appear largely funded by Apple advertising (which may simply be because that is where you’d put those ads, but might imply a cause and effect), you might wonder how independent they really are.”

MacDailyNews Take: Before anyone asks, we are completely independent. Of Apple. Of anybody, in fact. Of course, we are Apple Store (and iTunes Store and .Mac) affiliates because we’ve grown fond of food and shelter; this is where Apple-related ads naturally fit, as Enderle suggests. By the way, if Apple wants to make us an offer, please email at your convenience. Although, seriously, we think we love doing this too much to ever quit! We say “think” because we’ve never seen any offers from a company the size of Apple (the number of which are shrinking rapidly).

Enderle continues, “In the end, while I’m clearly embarrassed by the fact that I fell for Dan’s joke, he got me thinking about the big picture of power and influence in the post-Internet era. The question comes down to trust and the reality that we probably can’t trust things, and maybe never could, at face value anymore.”

MacDailyNews Take: Welcome to the world, Rob. As it is and as it has been since time began. The ’50s were blissful we’re sure (we’ve seen Happy Days reruns), but the fact is that you couldn’t trust any one news source’s opinion back then, either. Everyone has an opinion. Everyone has biases. Everyone who’s worthwhile in the “news” business votes. Detached, unbiased reporting always was a pipe dream. We’re have our leanings, too, of course. The difference here is that we put it right in the name of the site and we don’t pretend to offer the myth of unbiased reporting. That doesn’t preclude us from criticizing Apple when we see fit. We’ve done so in the past and will likely do so in the future as Apple’s unlikely to be perfect from here on out. Plus, we keep up-to-date on all platforms, so that we can very confidently tell personal computer users that if they use a Mac, they will be happier, less frustrated, and more productive than with any other operting system on the market today. We dare any Windows-only PC user reading this right now to try a Mac for real, for a week. We do so because we know what will happen in the vast majority of cases. Welcome Home. You won’t see the Enderles and Thurrotts of the world making the opposite dare.

Full article here.

MacDailyNews Take: Okay, so Enderle admits he fell for the FSJ hoax and then actually comes to the realization that most people in the media have known for, uh… ever: the media can’t be trusted at face value. That Enderle, after years of being quoted by the media and also scrawling his propaganda pieces, seems to have just come to that conclusion is shocking, but, then again, it’s not. Perhaps he really thought that, like himself, all of you believe whatever you read, so you’d just believe his pap, too? One problem ol’ Rob’s never had is being accused of being a genius.

Or maybe he’s just trying to cover for falling for FSJ’s joke and using that falsehood to indict Apple? Too bad he didn’t apologize for that, or for ginning up ridiculous rumors about Apple’s board members wanting to distance themselves from by far the best CEO Apple’s ever had, or for suggesting that Apple may have inventory problems with certain products based on pure nothingness, or for his unfortunate mustache, or for baselessly attacking Walt Mossberg, who, by the way, is only choosing what he considers to be the best product at the time. It’s not Walt’s fault that Apple has been killing their competitors for years now. He’s only calling it as he sees it. While he’s not infallible, he’s one of the very, if not the, best in the business and does not deserve a shred of criticism from one of, if not the, very worst. (Don’t worry J.D., you’re still the very worst.)

Anyway, as most of you know, but what’s always good to repeat, your best bet is to consume from a melange of trusted sources (based on their past performance) — sources that are not owned by the same conglomerate (good luck with that one) — and you’ll hopefully be able to distill kernels of truth out of that mixture. (This also works for horse racing handicappers. Sometimes.) In other words, if you’re only watching CNN or Fox News, you’re not getting the full story. If you want the full story, watch them both (and read, watch, and listen to many others), cringe/applaud/yawn where appropriate, and you’ll get a much clearer picture. Try to get some regular input from outside your home country, too, it’s often a revelation.