Beckism.com

Via Daring Fireball:

A decade ago, Wired was my favorite magazine. Today, they print mind-numbing tripe like Leander Kahney’s 3,500-word cover story, “How Apple Got Everything Right by Doing Everything Wrong”.

Nothing special (just another of John Gruber’s brutal tear-downs of an illogical article about Apple), but I completely agree that Wired has gone downhill (I’ve pointed it out before). Although I still sometimes find a good article in Wired, most of the articles I’ve read recently have made me wonder if there is an editorial staff, and if so why they don’t appear to have any idea what good journalism is.

You know it’s bad when a guy whose primary interest throughout school was printing lies is able to spot a publication that has lost its sense of what makes good journalism good.

From Wired, one of the biggest technology magazines that I know about. I subscribed to their RSS feed months ago, simply because every once in a blue moon something interesting pops onto the radar. Today I was titillated by this:

Hackers Take Down the Most Wired Country in Europe

My reaction after slogging through all five painful pages: what the fuck? Aside from being rife with typos (my personal favorite: they failed to capitalize the name of their own magazine on page four) and populated by nonexistent pictures, the article reads like a cheap action flick. We’ve got evil communists, bad-ass computer geeks, war propaganda, conspiracy, cyber-terrorism, total paranoia…you name it, it’s there.

Is this journalism? What the hell is wrong with the editors at Wired that they allowed this kind of crap to get published? I’m inclined to wonder if someone hacked Wired’s website and posted the article as some sort of off-color joke.

My god, I wrote satire and lies for four years, and it was better than this junk. I’m honestly tempted to unsubscribe from their RSS feed. If this kind of crap is their version of a “top story”, then I don’t really see a need to waste even the small amount of time it takes to skim their headlines every day.

Quite honestly, if I wanted to read poorly-done war propaganda I’d rather turn to Tod Holton, Super Green Beret than Wired magazine.

God, I love Tod Holton. If only I could unleash some magic monkeys on the Wired editors.