How the IT media manipulates the news

LAST WEEK there was an interesting example of how the general perception of the IT industry can be influenced and perhaps even manipulated by the IT media.

Last Wednesday, Hewlett-Packard released a press statement which said that the US Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) had signed a contract worth $784 million dollars over 10 years. Under the terms of the contract HP would provide support for the VistA Health Information Systems which are used at all 170 medical centres run by VA.

HP's statement went on to say that the current VistA system was an "adaptive environment that has increased performance, utilizes 64-bit architecture and has enhanced reliability and up-time."

You might think that a system with these characteristics could be of interest to a few IT decision-makers, but it seems like the IT news media begs to differ.

I have a strong suspicion that the deciding factor for the lack of coverage of HP's announcement was that the operating system was OpenVMS. It is simply an operating system that the media clearly prefers not to mention.

In fact, in fifteen IT publications I found by an online search, only three of them included a sentence mentioning OpenVMS and two of those shared the same story. All of the others didn't mention OpenVMS nor the characteristics of the platform used for VistA. One managed to have 12 sentences - HP's release only had 17 - and still managed to avoid it.

OpenVMS is treated like a black widow spider. About three years ago a well-known online publication had a lengthy article about the best systems for clustering. Given that OpenVMS had clustering back in 1985 and it still has features unmatched by other forms of clustering, it came as something of a surprise that it was not mentioned in the article.

I emailed the journalist then to ask why, especially because I had previously seen articles by him which mentioned OpenVMS. His reply basically was that his original article included OpenVMS but the editor removed those sections.

Recently there has been a lot of soul-searching by journalists in all spheres of activity about what it is that they do, how they do it and how their codes of ethics should reflect this. [Not here mate, Ed.]

In the U.S. the Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ) preamble to its code of ethics states that it "believes that public enlightenment is the forerunner of justice and the foundation of democracy. The duty of the journalist is to further those ends by seeking truth and providing a comprehensive account of events and issues. Conscientious journalists from all media and specialties strive to serve the public with thoroughness and honesty."

At the same time there has been considerable discussion whether ethics have been sacrificed for the sake of making money. There are fears that The Truth has been the loser as the media tries not to upset advertisers or the perceived biases of the readers because a loss of revenue could easily be the result. The rise of global news networks has also meant that journalists must tread very carefully with stories about parts of the company they work for or they might find themselves with limited job options.

One consequence of all this is the dumbing down of news and the rise of what is scathingly called "infotainment" or "newszak", but another consequence is the filtering of the news by the various media services. Don't put the readers off their breakfast, is a phrase that has been used.

There is also the question of how much the media reports opinion and how much it influences opinion, and whether this symbiotic relationship too easily builds one opinion to the exclusion of others. For good examples of this one only has to look at how the US media has covered the situation in Iraq over the last 18 months compared to numerous European media sources where a variety of opinions were expressed. Please, not a million emails of feedback on this point. I only use it as an example.

IT publications have these problems just as much as the news media at large.

We know that specialist IT publications are quite selective in the matters that they deal with but they probably aren't always as thorough with their critical analysis as they might be. The nature of specialising means their audience is limited and so is the number of potential advertisers.

Larger and more general publications have no excuse for not complying with the journalistic codes of ethics. The SPJ code states that journalists should endeavour to "give voice to the voiceless" but it seems that the IT media often ignore this in preference to writing almost exclusively about the "flavour of the month" hardware, applications and operating systems.

To what extent these publications also cater to advertisers and reflect the biases of their readers is a matter for your perception. What is more obvious is how through their statements or omissions they give rise to opinions that do not always match the facts and then snowball that opinion in selective quotes.

The term "legacy system" is a case in point. Older hardware does not sit well with advertisers who would like to be selling new machines and so the publications subtly denigrate these systems and call them "legacy". Over time the same outlets publish quotes expressing the opinion that legacy systems are a bad thing and this reinforces the perception. The reality is that companies are pragmatic and would replace older systems if they did not provide good value for the money spent, but apparently they do.

Cobol and Fortran - and OpenVMS for that matter - are rarely mentioned in the IT media and you might be forgiven for thinking that they disappeared years ago. They haven't. All are still being used, in plenty. The problem is that editors of IT publications have decided these are not worth reporting.

The moral is obvious - consider what biases publications might apply to their reports and try to investigate if there is significant information that they are not telling you or even simply distorting. Truth is often a slippery commodity. µ