I did have to ruefully chuckle as I read this appeal to the MSM, An Open Letter To The Members of The 1984 Corporate News Media. The author, Brian Cates, lays out the familiar stuff; the MSM censorship efforts; the utterly changed media landscape that is destroying those efforts, as well as the careers of journalists. Some of it is almost heart-rending in its hope:
Feeding the public endless government/corporate propaganda is for losers and devils. Aren’t you tired of it at this point? Is it really worth it to keep doing it?
How much money is a soul worth? How many figures in a paycheck make being a corporate propagandist worth it? A high five? Six? Seven?
Every day you have take another bite of the shit sandwich of dressing up the latest corporate-board-approved lies and ludicrous bullshit and making it look as good as possible in the hopes that enough of your remaining audience out there will buy it.
My sad amusement comes from the fact that this was written in late 2023 – and the MSM simply ploughed forward through 2024 doing all the same shit, desperately trying to prop up Joe Biden and then Kamala Harris.
Over the past 3 years, you should now be fully cognizant of how your byline and your name and your face was utilized in order to deliberately sell outright falsehoods to the people you asked to trust your reporting. Do you think of them as rubes and suckers? Or are you ashamed of yourself?
You know you lied not just about Hunter Biden or his real laptop, or COVID treatments/vaccines/lockdowns/masks but on many different subjects.
There comes a time you just can’t keep your head down and keep on churning out the propaganda any longer. Are you there yet?
They will never be “there yet”. They can’t be because they are the Left’s willing executioners. They and their MSM corporates cannot be fixed; death is the only solution.
As just one more example of how Brian doesn’t get it is that he included in his piece the classic Apple advertisement from the 1984 Superbowl, directed by none other than the great Ridley Scott (Alien, Bladerunner, Aliens, Gladiator, Blackhawk Down, The Martian), though we didn’t know it at the time.
Widely regarded as one of the greatest TV advertisements ever made it was, and remains, stunning to watch, as well as the genius of crafting Orwell’s dystopian story such that Apple is the girl and the hammer, with IBM easily cast as Big Brother – all without mentioning them by name.
By contrast this is Apple in 2022:
The largest lockdown uprising in China took place at facilities run by Apple’s Foxconn supplier where workers had previously jumped to their deaths. After thousands fled the Apple gulag, making their way through the woods and rural areas to freedom, other employees battled with Communist authorities over abusive conditions and treatment in the iGulag.
…
Jobs, the talented marketer who had positioned Apple as the company fighting totalitarianism with its 1984 ad, was aggressively offshoring the company’s labor to Communist China. What China had to offer was mass production under a ruthlessly totalitarian system that would, when Jobs decided to revamp the iPhone a month before launch, wake up 8,000 workers at midnight for a 12 hour shift.
At an Obama dinner, Jobs bluntly confirmed, “Those jobs aren’t coming back… What U.S. plant can find 3,000 people overnight and convince them to live in dorms?”
They were no help on freedom of speech either, as Hong Kong had already discovered a few years earlier:
After Jobs’ death, his widow took the money to build the Emerson Collective, pushing social justice in the fine tradition of atoning for evil with more evil, while CEO Tim Cook developed an even more incestuous relationship with Communist China that included signing a secret $275 billion pact to help Communist China develop “the most advanced manufacturing technologies” and vowed to use even more Chinese technology in Apple’s products.
When the Hong Kong protests began, the streets filled with young men and women, most of whom not only owned Apple products, but believed the hype that it was a noble company that didn’t just make gadgets, but aspired to harness human creativity for a better world.
Instead, Apple quickly moved to suppress the protests by removing an app used by the protesters to avoid police. Apple sanctimoniously declared that the protests were endangering “law enforcement and residents in Hong Kong” and claimed that it was responding to “concerned customers” worried that the popular protests threatened “public safety”.
And I own Apple products across-the-board.
No Minister 
Reminds me of the old saying: “Laws are like sausages. It’s better not to see them being made.” attributed to Otto von Bismarck.
Apple has been assembling its products offshore since the late 70s.
i have loathed Apple for decades… The holier than thou of the Apple groupies of the mid 1990s turned my stomach. Beautiful kit, great UI design, slick marketing and wildly over priced, led by a vile sociopath in Jobs.
Just cant purchase Apple devices ….
And yes the other main stream options are no better….. But the support staff in the Uni labs where vile and they probably slept with their Apple devices….. Tainted by association…
Tell us how you really feel, Trev. Don’t hold back. 😅😅😅😅
I finally caved to Apple back in 2003 when my old HP-MS POS desktop crapped out – all 2Gb of it. I’d almost bought an Apple in the States a few years earlier in a similar situation when a old, borrowed Apple desktop simply couldn’t work with a 90’s colour printer, so I went with Wintel. After all, it’s what I was used to in all my work for years at that point.
But after 2003 I never looked back. Overpriced? Maybe, but it was quality hardware and I could plug any new device in without getting the shitty driver demands that MS had promised, for a decade, would be in my past with the next edition of MOS.
And in a competition between handing my money to sociopath Gates and Jobs I can’t choose between them on that basis.
Plus all the photo, video editing stuff that made my home video productions a breeze, finally, to send to the grandparents.
Plus being able to rapidly digitise my music and then movie collection.
Plus just being reliable and not a pain. I got sick and tired of fucking MS constantly bugging me about software updates. My son, who runs a duel system (gaming ya know) says it’s just the same nowadays.
And that’s before we get to the iPad/iPhone.
Yeah, I agree with much of what you say and you may be amused to know that my BIL, a huge Apple fan through the 1980’s (I inherited an old Lisa from him mid-90’s) ended up working for MS for a decade and now has scathing things to say about the file structure/OS of Apple.
To put it bluntly, the sociopath’s stuff just plain works. Maybe that will change at some point because, hey, corporates, but for the moment I can’t see me going back to MS and I can’t be fucked with Linux at my age, even though I’m very impressed by what I see my son doing with it!!!!
I’ve used Apple in work and study scenarios but the early exposure with loathing it inspired has never waned. Plus Tim Cook gives me even worse creepy vibes than Jobs did.
I have a lot of both Apple and Windows PCs and laptops and I can’t really see a radical difference. Certainly my windows machines are a hell of a lot cheaper than the Apple equivalent (and I can configure the hardware to what I need), while the Apple gear is arguably “easier” to setup and get going.
I use Linux as well and it also has good points and annoying ones.
different tools for different jobs.
then again I started life writing code in 8086/8088 assembler so it’s all been an improvement since then