I have no idea if this post from Molly Wood truly reflects Apple's approach to public relations ("hammer and hammer and hammer and hammer"), or if it is just the usual journalistic hectoring of public relations people doing their job.
But the pull-out quotation from the Wall Street Journal that prompted the piece demonstrates why many business people (and the demos at large) occasionally -- okay, often -- question the devotion of journalists to seeking truth from facts. Since the WSJ article uses as its source "people familiar with the matter", "these people say" and "they say" it is also fair game to conjecture, as The Molly does, whether the publication has been spun by a zealous public relations "machine".
The blame, though isn't with the public relations people, as Wood accedes, but with lame and now inadequately supported journalism:
"It’s not a crime for a company to have a good PR machine. It’s working for Apple and it has for a long time. But this is a nation that is, at the moment, finding itself in quite a pickle because we blindly believed everything that companies were telling us. So, if we’re trying to be skeptical about, say, large financial institutions and their outlandish and/or reassuring claims, shouldn’t we also cast the same critical eye on a convenient flood of information that does little other than improve Apple’s stock price a week before they have to answer to angry and worried shareholders? Or, hey, maybe the Wall Street Journal just trying to boost the Nasdaq on purpose. You know, to help the economy."
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