Fortune: Forbes Lite

I've come to know Fortune as a sort of equal player to Forbes, only instead of avoiding it like the plague, I end up reading some of their articles, because they are fused with CNN.com... so if there's ever a story I'd like to read via "CNN Money," I end up reading what is basically Forbes Lite.

Today I read a particularly interesting article about the shutdown of 21 of Delphi's 29 plants in the United States. Delphi is asking a bankruptcy court to void its contract with the United Auto Workers union and General Motors to shut down the plants. Did I mention that this means approximately 24,500 of Delphi's 34 thousand employees will be laid off, including 8,100 salaried employees and thousands more hourly workers? That's funny. Because Fortune didn't.

Fortune instead chose to use its space talking about the possibility of a UAW strike. How terrible would that be? Well as it turns out, pretty bad for General Motors, who could be forced into bankruptcy by a strike. Newsworthy? Yes. But Fortune paints a "oh the poor multinational corporation with poor leadership and flawed marketing" picture without even mentioning what the workers have been through, or why they might strike. Here's a hint: they're all losing their jobs. Here's something else: they can't come to a labor agreement with Delphi, who wants to cut hourly wages from $27/hour to $16.50/hour.

Fortune paints this situation to be another one of the union being a bully, pushing around a company for it's own selfish needs. Does it seem like sixteen an hour is pretty good pay? Well how about we ask the nation's captains of industry to take a 39% tax increase, and then we'll see how much 39% of one's income really means to people.

If this is war...

There's plenty wrong with the Forbes blog attack article, not the least being that that author Lyons is wielding a blunt axe and swinging it wildly. ("He swings! He misses.") There's plenty to be said about that (especially regarding Sys-Con, SCO and the hatchet job he does on Pamela Jones) but in the meantime, this article in Rolling Stone, The New Web Slingers limns more of the reasons that blogs have the old media worried.

Clearly, it was the wrong moment to declare war on the blogosphere. Barely a week before the New York Times went public with its baffling account of ex-star reporter Judith Miller's unholy entanglement with vice-presidential aide "Scooter" Libby, the paper's executive editor, Bill Keller, proclaimed that Weblogs do nothing more than "recycle and chew on the news." Pride, as ever, goeth before the fall.

Caught flat-footed on the CIA-leak story, the Times saw its lunch handed to it by the new blogging elite. Leading the charge were the upstart gumshoes of RawStory.com, the pundits of the Huffington Post and a rear guard of Internet editorialists, all taking the Gray Lady to task for failing to practice the very "journalism of verification" that Keller claimed set the Times apart.

(And what's that "entanglement" between Miller & Libby about?)

Attack of the Forbes

Blogs are a threat to business, the cover story, Attack of the Blogs, in the Nov. 14, 2005 issue of Forbes reveals.

After telling a horror story about a man who's business was hounded by a blogger, the article goes on to uncritically list other blogs that are an annoyance to businesses. The problem, of course, is that many businesses deserve the scrutiny that blogs are giving, including some of those that Forbes cites.

One prominent example is Groklaw, which has taken up the task of keeping the opensource community informed of SCO's attempt to co-opt and privatize Linux, and coordinate volunteers' efforts to protect Linux. Groklaw provides an invaluable service.

But this is what Forbes has to say about Groklaw:

One blog, Groklaw, exists primarily to bash software maker SCOGroup in its Linux patent lawsuit against IBM, producing laughably biased, pro-IBMcoverage

The only real point of this laughably biased, anti-blog article seems to be, "damn that First amendment, can't we go back to the days when you had to pay in order to have your say? And who are those little people nipping at my ankles." The problem, of course, is the people Forbes writes for only want democracy if they can own it, lock, stock & barrel.

There is a peril that they'll try to muzzle us, but for now at least, it looks like the future belongs to us, and in that future, the dinosaur media is nothing but an oil slick in the road.