20070506,00 — McCracken's Gone and They Don't Care

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Harry McCracken is an award-winning journalist. He was with the IDG for sixteen years and at PC World for twelve. As editor in chief.

He resigned on 1 May 2007. He was reached by CNET the following evening and confirmed he'd left, explaining it was over disagreements with management. He however declined to comment further.

But three sources, on the condition of anonymity, spoke with CNET about McCracken. McCracken had informed staff the day after his formal resignation that the reason was a dispute with Colin Crawford, the new boss who'd just come over from Macworld.

Kim Zetter of Wired used to work at PC World and his friends there also told him what happened.

'Colleagues at my former outlet PC World magazine have told me that Harry McCracken quit abruptly today because the company's new CEO Colin Crawford tried to kill a story about Apple and Steve Jobs.'

'The piece, a whimsical article titled Ten Things We Hate About Apple, was still in draft form when Crawford killed it. McCracken said no way and walked after Crawford refused to compromise. Apparently Crawford also told editors that product reviews in the magazine were too critical of vendors, especially ones who advertise in the magazine, and that they had to start being nicer to advertisers.'

'Crawford was former CEO of MacWorld and only started at PC World about a month ago. According to the PC World source, when Crawford was working for the Mac magazine, Steve Jobs would call him up any time he had a problem with a story the magazine was running about Apple.'

'This is no way to run a magazine. But unfortunately, this looks like an indication of what we've got in store', said Zetter's source, who added that reporters were in effect boycotting the party planned with the Macworld people. Zetter adds:

'Harry's my former boss at PC World and someone I greatly respect. He's a top-notch writer and one of the smartest editors I've worked with. He didn't want to discuss the details of why he resigned but said he quit because of some fundamental disagreements with Colin. He emphasised that he wasn't fired or forced out and holds no ill feelings toward the company.'

'I've worked at IDG for 16 years. It's been unbelievably good to me, and I have 10,000 great memories so I'm not leaving an unhappy person', McCracken told Zetter.

But he left still the same. At which the Apple fanboy kamikaze press scrambled to action. No one's buying propaganda at the media, they whined. Our Steve Jobs wouldn't dream of doing such a thing. No one from Apple places phone calls to manipulate what people get to read.

Yeah right.

It's no news that corporations - and governments - are doing this all the time. The news feeds available to people in the US are prepared by the current White House administration and sent to the television and radio stations. It's a slant the way the powers that be want it.

Bill Gates and his slimy cohorts have even gone so far as to create grass roots movements from nonexistent people to thwart the actions of the US Department of Justice. Microsoft have been found out bribing editors of open source websites to 'astroturf' the discussions and the news in the Redmond corporation's favour.

Bill Gates even came out once and told the press that the DOJ trial was bad for the US economy. And so forth.

But by and large there are few people in the world of IT - aside from Thurrott - who will more than begrudgingly cooperate with Microsoft. The world of Windows is not a happy one and the developers and administrators who are stuck using it know full well how crappy it is and do so under protest. The Windows community is strongly bonded - but in aversion to all things Microsoft, not in blissful unity with them.

It's quite another thing on the Apple side of the fence. And as with the smear campaign against David Maynor, it matters not who called or did not call whom - what matters is these sickos do what they do of their own accord.

It's bad enough to accept a bribe to twist the news; it's far worse and far more critical when the Apple fanboys do so with no thought of recompense whatsoever.

Windows users will never touch the Kool-Aid; Apple fanatics will jump over each other to be the first to please their Master.