A Reporter Forfeited $8,500 to Write This Piece — And Others Like it
Commentary: Dell Technologies, honors, awards and the importance of telling ‘the rest of the story.’
BOSTON — Sometimes, getting half the facts is worse than no facts at all.
In January, Dell Technologies Inc. tweeted about CEO Michael Dell being named a candidate for CEO of the decade by the TechNewsWorld website.
The next day (on Jan. 24), Michael Dell retweeted the announcement and wrote that he was honored by the recognition. However, neither the company nor Dell himself pointed out that TechNewsWorld is operated by the highly respected Oregon-based Enderle Group Inc.
Its principal analyst, Rob Enderle, wrote the CEO article. He is a paid Dell contractor. So, the recognition was more than an honor for Dell. It was money well spent.
Enderle also appears in a nearly two-minute video on the Dell Technologies website praising Dell’s products versus rival’s Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. Early in the video, the words Analyst opinion commissioned by Dell EMC briefly appear at the bottom, left of the screen.
Consequently, Michael Dell’s nomination as CEO of the decade was made by a tech analyst paid to promote Dell Tech. That’s quite different than if it was from an objective source, right?
There’s nothing sinister about a company promoting its honors or citations. It’s par for the course. Companies always look for ways to highlight their brands and people.
That’s where objective journalism comes in. Unbiased reporters check and counterbalance such claims by presenting details that provide the reader with crucial context. Or as syndicate national radio host Paul Harvey used to say: “The rest of the story.”
The TechNewsWorld article highlights how important objective, independent reporting can be and the role that the press can play. Without such reporting, readers would be left believing that Enderle’s nomination of Dell was unbiased.
Dell’s hyping of the dubious distinction shouldn’t surprise close observers of the company. After all, in early 2018, the New York Times reported that Michael Dell actually buys Twitter followers.
TRACKING THE TRUTH
The CEO article was definitely not an outlier.
In April, Forbes ran a story about how Dell’s services division continues to operate during the pandemic. The article, posted by Moor Insights & Strategy, was ostensibly intended to highlight the company’s fight against Covid-19.
The piece promoted Dell’s role in providing technology for a hospital in Wuhan, China, that was inundated with Coronavirus patients. Moor Insights, a Texas consulting firm that also works for Dell, concluded that Dell employees “are absolutely integral to the [Covid-19] efforts, and deserve recognition. Good work, Dell.”
The rest of the story? On July 24, U.S. officials closed China’s consulate in Houston claiming that it was used to steal American intellectual property. Chinese cyber-spies used the location to swipe scientific research related to Covid-19.
In July 2019, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, a New York-based watchdog group, exposed how the parent of company of Reddit and New Yorker magazine threatened this reporter who revealed how a story about Dell suddenly disappeared from the Web in 2015.
Curiously, the story also involved another dubious honor.
The missing Austin Business Journal story detailed how Michael Dell received an award from a national environmental group after his company donated $75,000 to the group for the first time. The facts were fully vetted, approved by editors and never disputed. Also, no one in Dell’s hypersensitive media relations department made the slightest objection after the piece was posted.
About a week later, a senior Dell exec threatened the ABJ’s North Carolina-based parent company, American City Business Journals, ABJ managers said. An initial story about the award remained on the Web. But the executive and ACBJ managers must have decided that readers didn’t need “the rest of the story.”
The truth about the $75,0000 payment was then whitewashed, the Web sanitized, tweets deleted and public trust betrayed. This reporter’s $8,542 severance package was contingent on a non-disclosure agreement that was rejected.
As the news industry continues to contract, such incidents have become more common; true reporters are replaced with so-called “content writers” discouraged from questioning corporate news releases.
Such conditions create a natural tension between powerful advertisers like Dell and the media companies seeking their business. As a result, media execs need to delicately balance business savvy and the courage to tell, well, the rest of story.