Since this topic of streaming wars has been hotly debated recently, it was fairly easy to find an article that was relevant and worth reading. Kevin Stankiewicz wrote an article for CNBC titled “Ex-Netflix, Hulu exec Simon Gallagher on streaming service Apple TV+”.
I was immediately drawn to this article because the author was clearly displayed at the top, raising a green flag for me. Once I clicked on his name I could see everything else he had written recently for CNBC, and you can also click the link to his Twitter account. This gives me the impression that he stands behind what he writes and isn’t attempting to fool readers. I like that it is clearly visible, but I would like to read more about the author himself instead of what he has written. What makes him a credible author that readers should listen to?
Now, before even reading the piece, I can tell that the writing may contain some bias simply from the title alone. A former Netflix exec is saying positive things about Apple’s newly announced streaming service. It makes me wonder if he is either hinting that he thinks Netflix is fragile in this situation, or he really believes in the new Apple TV+ service. Either way, there is definitely going to be bias in the material.
The first word in the first paragraph contains a link to another article regarding Apple. The first three links in the article led to more articles by CNBC about related topics. While they may have provided more background information that gives credibility to the new information, there are no outside sources which causes me to be concerned for confirmation bias within the company. Writers need to make it easy for readers to verify information without doing their own extensive research.
After clicking on a link to see the stock numbers for Apple and Netflix, I looked at their charts to see if any information on them was misleading. Now I do not know a whole lot about how the stock exchange works or what is a lot and what is not a lot in terms of numbers, but I read that one point is equal to one dollar. They had the charts displaying each increment as one whole point. This made the lines going down look very dramatic, even though it isn’t a huge drop. I think that information is a little irrelevant to this article, but it is important to see how they regularly display information.
Overall, I give the writing a C. It provided a lot of information and statistics, but there was favor to one side of the story and not the other. There were no links to outside sources for readers to clarify and verify information. As we learned in class, there aren’t always two sides to every story, but in this case there is a lot of information on the other side that the readers here do not see. This is very one sided, and the author failed to inform the readers of the whole story. It doesn’t appear that the author was trying to be persuasive, but either the writing or the information was biased.
