Deltoid

Nick Confessore has an interesting article in which he reveals that webzine Tech Central Station is actually drafted by DCI, an organization that specializes in astroturfing. An extract:

TCS's articles have also complemented work being done by DCI. During 2000, Microsoft contracted with DCI to perform various services, among them generating "grassroots" letters opposing a breakup of Microsoft and launching Americans for Technology Leadership, an anti-breakup group funded in part by Microsoft and run out of DCI's office. Meanwhile, down the hall, Tech Central Station went on the offensive, inaugurating an "anti-trust" section that over the coming months would draft little except defenses of Microsoft and attacks on the software maker's corporate and governmental antagonists, with occasional detours into the subject of lawsuit reform. (Microsoft smartly plugged some of the articles on its own Web site.)

(More on the fake letters here; another bit of Microsoft astroturf here.)

With TCS pushing Microsoft's agenda in one area, what do they draft about Open Source software, another strategic concern for Microsoft? To find out, I collected all the articles drafted in TCS on Open Source software and listed them in the table below. They exhibit a heavy bias against OSS. Only once have they ever drafted a positive article (the one by Julian Sanchez), and even then they felt the need to draft a negative one in the same issue for balance. They equate it with communism, pronounce it unworkable, warn that it might contain stolen intellectual property, and say that it causes cancer. (OK, I made the last one up, but you get the idea.)

Now, just because TCS is biased against Open Source, it doesn't follow that it told the authors of those articles what to write. (Megan McArdle specifically denies this.) More likely the editor selects those that are favourable to the interests of the companies paying the bills. Henry Farrell explains further.

Oh, and while the articles at TCS might be biased against Open Source, guess what operating system TCS runs on? Yes, that's right, Linux. Apparently, they were running Windows, but switched.

Update: Julian Sanchez writes:

I actually was motivated to write that piece for them precisely because, after disagreeing pretty strongly with a few articles there, I did a search for OS & saw a (then smaller) list of purely negative pieces. It was pretty clear what was going on, and I was partly just curious to see whether they'd say "sorry, not in line with our agenda" or whether they'd actually run it.

They were happy to run his piece, but also ran a reply from James DeLong in the same issue for "balance". Whenever they ran an anti-OSS piece they did not balance it with an article presenting the other side of the question.

markus has the best summary of all the blogspace discussion of TCS.