Time for HP to clean house

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Out of Order: Pay for Content Vs Advertisement: Lobby firms who pay or threaten journalists so that content reflects their advocacy are what is out of order.

The best example of this is the Preston Gates and Ellis law firm.

Why Law firms are allowed to lobby or public relation at all is a question but in any case this particular firm was formed specifically to help Microsoft with its permatemp and antitrust issues and its innovation was to apply something called Astroturffing to create an appearance of grass roots support for Microsoft and distaist for the US antitrust remedies.

Astroturfing has its roots in the selling of drugs and there is a great book called The Selling of Sickness which describes it in detail.

In anycase, vocal members of society, bloggers and journalists, activists and politicians are assigned handlers. These handlers follow everything the blogger or journalist says and when what is said doesn't fit the desired portrayal of reality the vocal are contacted and made deals that can not be refused.

Often family are contacted and often the threat of law suits (the threat itself being illegal in many states) are used to silence the vocal. Contacting employers and paying the employer to fire the vocal is a common strategy IMO, though I can not find data supporting this assumption. I got this notion from the film "Other Side of Midnight". Hiring relatives has been documented.

I suppose handlers like working for law firms because they feel they have the protection of legals behind them but it is more likely that these handlers will be scapegoated like Abramoff was through Preston Gates and Ellis when the timing made that possible.

Lawyers themselves may participat as handlers and when that happens or they are caught having others do wrong you might expect disbarment.

Unfortunately, and as the Seattle times has documented recently, US courts, at least the ones in Washington State, are likely to seal files involving wrong doing lawyers because of a notion that once the public is aware of complaints against a lawyer that lawyer may never be able to practice again.

Of course the same can be said for physicians only the courts are less likely to seal such records these days and the same is becoming true for the legal professon the more journelists expose this practice.

In the case of the Seattle Weekly, whoes editor and writers continued to be vocal about Microsoft realities, the paper was purchased and sold a few times (again offers that can not be refused) until the editor "bowed out" because of budget or other job unpleasantry.

I suspect Zdnet is into the kind of problems that Seattle Weekly got into. Hopefully the end result will be expose like the Seattle Times has been doing and the Wall Street Journel does. I think the WSJ has been using expose of this kind of thing as a way of self preservation for some time. Do you all know that WSJ and Microsoft once had a close relationship involving WSJ online?

My sence is that HP has a firm like Preston Gates and Ellis advising them, that this advice ignores standards of propriety, treats employees, board members, and customers as criminal clients and is where the beef is for this story. Zdnet should find out who are the legals at HP. In particular the outside legals.

Another notion worth investigating comes from "Inconvienent Truth". Close to 100 percent of the technical trained may say Microsoft Operating sytems are of poor quality. But firms like Preston Gates and Ellis will push presses to print articles saying otherwize under the claim of a fair and ballanced presentation. What is not correct is that of 100 articles; 50 end up pro Microsoft when by the technically trained standard of 100 articles 1 would be fair and ballanced.

What is different about computer scientists and legals is that the computer scientist advances his career by proving a theory false, where as the legal advances his career by creating doubt - fear, uncertanty and doubt - FUD.

Huzzah Zdnet for its role in the expose. It will sustain us for months.

Frank L. Mighetto CCP

Stand Up.; Posted by: mighetto Posted on: 09/08/06 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use