The Guardian's readers editor decides to tackle the thorny problem of quite why the newspaper runs so many articles about Apple. For a number of readers have complained, some going so far as to inquire whether the paper's soul has been captured by Cupertino in some manner:
Put simply, the argument is this: the Guardian has been "brainwashed" by Apple to give the company and its products excessive amounts of favourable publicity. This is the way one reader put it following the launch of the new iPad on 7 March: "I'm sure you've heard this complaint before [yes], but I simply cannot understand why the Guardian thinks it wise to give a priority, front-page photo to Apple's new commercial release.
"Are we to believe that this is simply a matter of the popularity of Apple products? I certainly don't remember this much coverage when Microsoft, or any other company, were producing new products. Is the Guardian a believer in the cult of Apple?
There are a number of good answers to this question not all of which the Guardian provides. Apple is the world's most valuable company for example. It has, in the past decade, entirely revolutionised two parts of the consumer electronics business. Indeed, the smartphone, which the iPhone was the first decent implementation of, looks like becoming the fastest adopted technology ever in the history of the entire human species so far. Which sound like pretty good reasons to cover the company and its products really.
However, it's the implications of this point that tell us something deeper about the newspaper industry:
Charles Arthur is the Guardian's technology editor, and in his role has written many, but by no means all, of the stories featuring Apple in the past year. He said: "The statistics show that people read about Apple stuff. If a story involves the company, it gets huge readership.
People tend to read the stories about Apple. Thus stories about Apple tend to get written. We could be superficial and say that it's just about getting the clicks on the website (and we could go meta-superficial on the same point about this piece itself). Or we could point to a deeper truth about newspapers, indeed all media outlets, themselves.
Far from media forming the mindset of the readers and viewers the various outlets chase the pre-formed opinions of the various possible audiences. People who watch Fox News don't have views that you disagree with because Fox has told them so. Rather, there are people who have different views and Fox has decided to chase their custom in a manner that CBS, or PBS, has decided not to. Those two have decided to chase the patronage of people who think as you do. Please do insert any media outlet at all and any viewpoint here, for all are doing exactly the same thing. It really isn't a matter of changing people's attitudes, it is of pandering to them.
We see this more clearly in the UK newspaper business than we do in many other media arenas. The US big city newspaper business is still not a national market and the UK one has been for near a century now (national distribution of newspapers was pretty much all worked out by before WWI). The UK papers have thus all been reporting pretty much the same news as each other all this time. The way they have differentiated the product is by applying an editorial slant to it, to the presentation of that news. The Guardian for upper middle class lefties, The Telegraph for upper middle class righties, The Times for those who think they run the country, Mail and Express for varying forms of righty middle middle class, Daily Mirror of left working class, The Sun for right such (and anyone who understands social conservatism rather than economic will know that there's an awful lot of them). These editorial lines are not to persuade these groups to have certain ideas: they are that everyone knows that said groups have certain ideas which the editorial line must chase. And the true genius of a really good editor is to understand when what the target market believes has changed and to be able to pander to that.
There's another way to put the same argument. Newspapers, just like all other businesses, produce what they think consumers want. People seem to want stories about Apple so that's what The Guardian provides. The only problem with The Guardian actually saying exactly this is that the paper's own editorial line is that consumers are just dupes of advertising and are near forced to buy whatever it is that corporations decide they'd like to produce. So while the explanation might be true it's not one they can really use.
