WKOW/College Girl vs. Internet
Posted by voice | Filed under Rant
Many of you have probably read on digg, reedit, slashdot, ect. of the girl in Wisconsin who dropped her online classes because she ordered a Laptop with Ubuntu installed on it. What followed is probably a big wall of bashing from the Internet that rivaled the ignorance of Mac users on the Internet. However having read the article, and the subsequent update to the original article I believe the reporter who wrote the story is incompetent at best. First off, just the way the story was written was horrible and I cringed with every word I read. It made it out that because the girl in question was unwilling to try to solve the problem practically it was obviously Dell and Ubuntu’s fault for her failures in higher learning. As other people online have noted, Dell has made it very difficult to mess up ordering this badly, you honestly have to google on how to order a Dell laptop with Ubuntu. I honestly believe the girl deserves what she gets for failing to visually verify her order before submitting it, and given that she was in a Technical College, that implies she has some knowledge in computers.
Then we’ve got this blog entry by Ron Giordan of WKOW-TV (Madison, Wisconsin) that just further derails the station’s integrity. Let me start off by saying that Ron claims to have been in the journalism business for more than two decades, but by reading his blog entry I cannot in good conscious believe this person is more than 25 years old. It was a flaming post on the same level as the people he claimed to be sending him hate mail. No professional would ever post this kind of mediocre crap on their blog:
I want each of you to remember why you got picked on in grade school and high school and feel the need to act this way as adults…if you even are adults. PS: let the flame war on me begin…frankly, the more traffic I get to my blog, the cooler I am!
Even if you’re trying to be hip or keeping up with our current generation’s forming of sentences you don’t put that out there. Remember now, I’m a 21 year old college student and my blog post alone is proving to be more mature than lines of words put out on the blog post in question. Heres another lovely quote from Ron’s mind, rembmer people, he claims to be a professional:
But…I have to tell you, this last e-mail, by far, is the best angry viewer e-mail I have ever read in my nearly 2 decades working in a newsroom. This person was so upset by this story he spent a lot of time looking up words in his thesaurus and, in the end, his letter touched on nothing substantive. I am letting you read the entire letter because I have laughed at it so much; I want all of you to laugh as well!
This is how he describes how a person he only names as Jeremy wrote his letter to Ron, which is surprisingly well written for hate mail. I’m honestly shocked and surprised news organizations allow people like Ron to work and speak for them, and its setting a bad precident. You would expect this kind of posting on a Internet message board. A journalist who cannot accept criticisim and in reponse fires back in a troll-ish way is not a good journalist, and should not be allowed to work in the industry. I agree that some of the comments may go too far, and harassing people on their facebook pages, albeit facebook is horrible to begin with, is not the way to about doing things, but that does not justify this kind of rambling from Ron Giordan, or any other journalist for that matter.
I end my rant now with a screenshot of my Dell Inspiron E1705 laptop, running Ubuntu, with Microsoft Word ’07 and the Internet working.
Microsoft Word and the Internet working in Ubuntu
