Irresponsible journalism from TGDaily

Tech journalists need not be completely unbiased. A real professional one needs to be in order to be ethical but that’s not usually the case. Everybody have their respective likes and nots and they somehow affect their writing. TG Daily is (although fast losing its credibility) a respectable tech news site. But once in a while some incompetent journalist (or so claims to be) comes with a very irresponsible article. I came across a few in recent time but this one made me want to write about it.

The article in question is titled “Ubuntu is rubbish“. These kind of X OS is rubbish articles appear everyday but when it happens in TG Daily, it can create some noise. And rightly so it did. See the article here http://www.tgdaily.com/content/view/44443/140/.

It was supposed to be a review of the newest Ubuntu release, 9.10. But the reviewer was unable to install it due to a bug, so he just gave up. Nevertheless, he went ahead with the so-called review, even though he couldn’t install the OS. His review is simple: “Ubuntu is rubbish“. Why? Because he couldn’t install it.

Now the funny part is this. I quote here from the article: “…we techies – who started on mainframes in 1972…“. So you would expect this guy to posses some kind of computing knowledge right? I mean I haven’t even seen a mainframe for real, let alone use one.  The problem happened because he used a release candidate in the testing. Now why would anyeone use a RC to do a review? and call it a rubbish when he finds a bug in that? That is just irresponsible journalism.

RC’s are so-called (and not stable) for a reason. For the reason that there will be bugs! And this techie from the the 70’s is sadly not aware of it. So what does he do? He goes on and writes another article (+1 for his articles count). Which is here http://www.tgdaily.com/content/view/44453/140/. And he puts the blame on Ubuntu again for the bug and tries to wash his hands clean.

He may have started his article with bashing Ubuntu but along the way he points his finger at Linux. Ironically the TG Daily is hosted on Linux platform too (according to Netcraft). Linux may not have gained much popularity on desktops but it is a heavyweight contender in server market. So calling Ubuntu/Linux rubbish is just absurd.

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