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Almost Nothing About the ‘Apple Harvests Gold from iPhones’ Story Is True

655 points by MikusR 11y ago

FreedomToCreate 11y ago
This hits the nail on the head in calling out news reporting sites who don't fact check or truthfully report a topic. Its incredible how far from the actually story the Apple recycled gold headline deviates and really makes you wonder if citing so called reputable sources is even valid in some cases.
- rm_-rf_slash 11y ago
  That's the problem with 24/7 news and the Internet. 1: Someone breaks a story 2: People get interested and share it with their friends 3: Other sources want a piece of that action so they bandwagon and cite the original piece for their own version. I am often struck at how our modern communications framework, going all the way back to the telegraph, has allowed so much misinformation to be spread.
  - scholia 11y ago
    Some of those reporters are contracted to write five or even 10 posts per day. It's not like a NYT or WSJ reporter spending three weeks or three months on one story. Also, because Google promotes blogspam without any regard for content quality (see the "freshness algorithm"), you lose money by spending longer on a post. It's the exception rather than the rule that somebody will come along several days later and hit it out of the park, but well done Jason Koebler.
    - uxp 11y ago
      > Some of those reporters are contracted to write five or even 10 posts per day. It's not like a NYT or WSJ reporter spending three weeks or three months on one story. Vice doesn't necessarily fall out of that category either. Smack dab in the middle is the statement: "I still had outstanding questions, which I asked Apple ... The company has not yet responded." The number of times I've read a developing story that has had that or similar in it is countless. Apple isn't known to have an army of PR representatives waiting for the next question to come down the pipeline, but it begs the question of how long they waited before publishing the story and just hoping they can update the story later while it's still getting pageviews.
      - jkoebler 11y ago
        I wrote this article, I gave Apple 18 hours to respond. The article has now been out for four hours or so, and it's been close to 24 hours since I originally asked them. Apple RARELY responds to press inquiries and the only time it has reliably spoken to the press was during the recent encryption battle and that's because it desperately needed the public to understand its argument. I understand what you're getting at, but Apple loses nothing by having the original story misreported—it ends up looking really good. Apple just straight up ignores reporters, all the time.
        rm_-rf_slash 11y ago
        When I worked at Apple I was shocked, truly shocked, to find that their PR/Advertising was mostly handled by a company in LA and not done entirely in-house. On one hand I get how secrecy works well for Apple, but on the other it gives them less control over Crystallizing Public Opinion and occasionally results in some pretty weak ads for uninspired product(s/ updates), like the 5s parts all coming together: beautiful but meaningless.
        st3v3r 11y ago
        That really doesn't seem like a lot of time for them to respond. Especially given that for 10 or so of those hours, people are probably at home, asleep, or with their families.
        jkoebler 11y ago
        I see what you're saying—but companies regularly respond to things like this very quickly. At least to say "we're looking into it" or "can you give us some time to respond." Apple and every other major company has people on call for things like this 24 hours a day, they have email on their phone ... the company saw my questions and chose not to respond. They still haven't responded or acknowledged it.
        scholia 11y ago
        Apple's approach is to pick favorites, like Walt Mossberg, and then to play its handful of favorites off against one another. (Time gives you a bad review, Newsweek gets the next exclusive interview; or it's NYT vs WSJ.) The rest of us are generally ignored, so we have to pick up scraps from the chosen few. Obviously the big titles get more attention than small ones -- nobody has an infinite supply of time -- but companies like Google, Microsoft and Intel cope with dozens if not hundreds of journalists worldwide. They even deal with journalists that they think view them unfavorably.
    - rveeblefetzer 11y ago
      I'm a journalist; lots of my colleagues were floored watching the doc about the NYT, "Page One," when David Carr tells his editor, "I'm doing two more weeks of reporting on this, then it might take a week to write it and show it to you."
  - yefim 11y ago
    Relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/978/ https://xkcd.com/978/
  - __jal 11y ago
    I wonder if there's a publicity effect here. Much in the same way that police abuse has been going on forever but didn't get attention until everyone got a camera in their phone, I think bullshit "news" stories have always been with us. The net makes it much easier to debunk these, and for the news of the debunking to spread in the same way the original story did. That's not to say the insatiable, screwed up incentives to publish on the net before fact checking aren't problematic. I just question whether shoddy/misleading/outright false "news" has actually gotten worse, or whether we just notice it more because corrections and factchecks in some cases become news in their own right (like here).
  - astrodust 11y ago
    It's a fundamental constant of the universe. Comforting lies spread faster than inconvenient truths.
  - cooper12 11y ago
    I mean packet loss and mutation is inherent to communication though. Just consider the game of telephone or how rumors spread; the technology doesn't matter, it's our own memories and interpretations that are at fault. In this case people are too trustworthy of information from others and don't scrutinize it.
- knowaveragejoe 11y ago
  This is ironic considering Vice routinely bends the truth in favor of outrage porn themselves. In this case, the author doesn't appear to know exactly how much of the waste in the 90 million pounds figure was actually Apple products, though based on the rough calculation that CRT monitors make up the vast majority of e-waste weight he estimates that it is very little. That appears to be the meat of the controversy here. It's not that no e-waste recycling occurred, it's that the $40 million in gold figure is dubious-at-best. Apple paid the companies to perform electronics recycling, which the article itself says is a non-lucrative business and in large part exists solely because manufacturers pay for these recycling programs. I'm not sure if there's a real issue here(other than perhaps the media taking something and running with it for clicks).
  - jrochkind1 11y ago
    I'm not sure if there's any 'controversy', the OP article doesn't seem to neccesarily think there is one, or that Apple has done anything wrong. The OP article just says that the thing everyone's saying about 'Apple harvests gold from iPhones and makes $40 million" just isn't true. It's not a question of 'controversy', it's a question of understanding what's actually going on in the world regarding our resource consumption and waste generation and where the costs of such are borne -- something we probably need to be more familiar with if we want to keep living on this planet.
- compiler-guy 11y ago
  Somewhat before (but not completely before) the crazy 24/7 internet-news-cycle started, I was interviewed by the Wall Street Journal about an activity I participated in. For about two days after it was published, I got calls from various lesser-known news outlets, and in the end, I did two more interviews, one with a local television station, and one with a very small radio talk show. I didn't feel that any of the three organizations got the nuances and details right in their final stories. The WSJ got the big picture mostly right, but made it look like I took a different angle than I did; the local news station intentionally omitted important facts to drive some humor. The radio program was a live interview, but moved on to the next question so quickly that I didn't have a chance to give much detail. I don't think any of this was avoiding fact-checking, or misrepresenting the truth of my story. But accurate reporting is very hard, and no news outlet gets it right. Ever since then, I take every story I see with a grain of salt. The main point might be what the subject thinks, but at the very least it is missing details and nuance. This leads me to treat the subject of any news story with a lot more compassion than it may seem like they deserve on the surface.
  - megablast 11y ago
    Often they dumb down a story for their audience. While you might think it is important to talk about the issue of merging 2 branches, they may rephrase that bit.
- I_HALF_CATS 11y ago
  While this article is a good exception... In writing a book on Vice media I had the idea to see which american media outlets issue more corrections and updates. Vice scored the absolute worst. Much worse than Time, Gawker and Fox News. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1MQ6IiQcorsN_pnY6oX1h1K52N66mMw4crpOqVYQJiNg/edit?usp=sharing https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1MQ6IiQcorsN_pnY6oX1h... Motherboard scored the best among the Vice verticals but not well in the grand scheme of things.
johansch 11y ago
Apple misled media. I hope media learns from this.
- morgante 11y ago
  Where is evidence of Apple misleading media? Apple certainly never said they were making money off recycled gold.
  - sp332 11y ago
    Apple announced a robotics project last month called "Liam". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AYshVbcEmUc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AYshVbcEmUc It recovers "cobalt and lithium", "gold and copper", "silver and platinum". The number "2,204 pounds of gold" comes from page 17 of this PDF https://www.apple.com/environment/pdf/Apple_Environmental_Responsibility_Report_2016.pdf https://www.apple.com/environment/pdf/Apple_Environmental_Re... which prominently displays Liam on the cover page.
    - morgante 11y ago
      Mentioning two different facts about their recycling programs on completely different pages of a holistic report about their environmental responsibility now constitutes "misleading the media?"
      - sp332 11y ago
        First, it's on the same page. The discussion of Liam starts 3 lines below the number 2204. Second, the video clearly states that the gold from iPhones is recycled. It would be clearer to say that the phone parts which happen to contain gold are put into refurbished phones. It's not extracting the gold at all, and that's why it's misleading.
        morgante 11y ago
        > First, it's on the same page. The discussion of Liam starts 3 lines below the number 2204. And 2 lines above the gold it says 61,357,800lbs of total material, in a figure much more clearly connected than the ostensible paragraph. When Liam is introduced on that page, Apple explicitly says it is "a line of robots designed to disassemble 1.2 million phones a year." Unless you think the average phone weighs 61 pounds, it's obviously not responsible for the total material recycling chart above. Nobody could possibly read this report and come away thinking that Liam is recycling millions of dollars of gold.
wklauss 11y ago
These kind of stories are useful to understand to what extent the media has turned into an echo chamber. Everybody has to have (or comment on) the same stories than everybody else has, so fast copying (with or without attribution) has become a de-facto practice in every news outlet out there. Good for Motherboard to wait and check. Unfortunately this means we will see this article now in all the outlets that published the previous one with a hand-washing disclaimer ("remember that article SOMEONE ELSE wrote that we talked you about last week, well...")
- retox 11y ago
  >we will see this article now in all the outlets that published the previous one Don't hold your breath
- r3bl 11y ago
  I'm not in the US, but if it's anywhere similar to the situation I live in, media outlets will either: 1. Make a small apology for not sharing the truth that's not going to be very visible on their website. 2. Just ignore the facts. Their work is done, they're moving on to different stories and pretty much forgetting this one. Now, if 1st case happens, and it happens very rarely, you can bet that the apology is not going to be read by as large amount of people as the original story was. Therefore, a lie will become a "fact" in the eyes of regular people. Example: the most popular newspapers in one European country next to mine shared screenshots of a very popular porn actress's video, but claimed that it were porn videos of the (female) president of the country next to it. Of course, this was a blatant lie, the head of that news outlet made a public apology (over Twitter for sure, not sure if he did it over his news outlet), but if you ask Regular Joe, that story still remains true, because the apology made nowhere near the impact as the original story did (as you can imagine).
abhi3 11y ago
Summary: Various media sites claimed apple recycled $40 million worth of gold from iphones, they were dead wrong. What actually happened is that Apple is under statutury obligation to recycle a certain weight of e-waste depending on it market share or weight of electronics sold (depending on state laws). The e-waste doesn't have to be of the manufacturers own products. Apple paid third party recyclers to recycle mostly CRT's and PC's (iphone have hardly any gold and are much more valuable refurbished, In fact, phones and tablets often don’t count toward the overall recycling requirements in many state laws.) and probably incured a loss rather than a 40 million windfall as claimed in news articles. Original Article: 1500 words (~8 minute read) Summary: 114 words (less than a minute) The articles goes in to some more detail and analyzes the mandatory recycling laws deeper as well. There is also some commentary of how many other sites got it very wrong and overview of the e-waste recycling industry. Reading recomended if you want gain more knowledge on this. If you'd like such summaries for all articles before you read them check out: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11535695 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11535695
- bobwaycott 11y ago
  Hey, can you cut it out with the summary advertising crap?
  - trollingineeer 11y ago
    STFU, Bob! I don't want to read an entire article.
  - efdee 11y ago
    Yes, how dares he provide an interesting service while pitching his startup on a startup related news aggregator.
    - bobwaycott 11y ago
      This isn't the only time s/he's done it, and it reads as unnecessary ad spam—which is frequently looked down upon here. The same thing was downvoted in another thread. And if this user is going to continue doing it, it's going to become very annoying very quickly.
ck2 11y ago
Not that I would confuse CNN as actual journalism with investigative journalists but how many times a day does CNN say "we have not been able to independently verify" about a story, yet doesn't bother with stuff like this? How can these places claim "freedom of the press" without having to prove they are "press" or what "press" even is?
c3534l 11y ago
What does it say about the world we live in where blogs do more basic journalism than CNN? All that one would have had to do is read the report actually provided. I don't think I'm being too extreme when I say that, apart from maybe PBS, there is no reputable source of news in America. If you don't believe me, pick a random story, watch it as it gets rewritten a million times through Reuters, then check back on the facts of the story one year later. A news story gets twisted to promote some narrative that will sell papers, and when the facts of the story are finally verified (usually not by the news themselves, but lawyers or courts or whoever), the story is dropped and never reported on again. Again, if the only thing a reporter had to do was read the report to find the facts of the case to verify what is and isn't true, what the fuck is even the point of a news agency?
- adventured 11y ago
  I think you're being too extreme. Bloomberg, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and to a lesser extent the NY Times are all still reputable, even if they all still produce occasional junk. I don't believe there is a single reputable news source on earth, if the qualification is never producing junk articles.
  - e40 11y ago
    The Wall Street Journal is getting less so. Being a Murdock owned publication it was/is bound to happen. After the purchase, the political coverage has taken a decided more conservative leaning. I wouldn't be surprised if it's also infected the financial reporting.
    - marcoperaza 11y ago
      People make the mistake of equating editorials with political news. They are not the same thing. The opinion section, the pages that have OPINION in big bold text at the top, are forthrightly conservative/libertarian, even though they have at least one regular liberal opinion columnist (William Galston) and constantly have guest articles written by politicians and business leaders of all stripes. The news sections are totally different and are pretty unbiased.
awinter-py 11y ago
they're after me lucky charms
DonHopkins 11y ago
Have other people noticed how many articles go out of their way to compare things in different units, like "30% of people do this, and 1 out of 5 do that"? It's like they're trying to make it hard to compare things numerically on purpose, so you have to read and believe the conclusion in their verbal narrative.
alexkavon 11y ago
This reminds of a great article from Blake Ross that demonstrates the laziness in journalism today. It also goes into detail about a few simple ways a journalist can investigate a topic: https://medium.com/@blakeross/don-t-outsource-your-thinking-ad825a9b4653 https://medium.com/@blakeross/don-t-outsource-your-thinking-...
nstj 11y ago
> Amount of material recovered for reuse through take-back initiatives in 2015 > Gold 2204 [lbs] [0] [0]: http://images.apple.com/au/environment/pdf/Apple_Environmental_Responsibility_Report_2016.pdf http://images.apple.com/au/environment/pdf/Apple_Environment... So is the Vice story trying to claim that "take back initiatives" aren't run by Apple? This
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ronkwan 11y ago
aapl = pretentious
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zatkin 11y ago
In Apple's defense, I would imagine that most people who are getting rid of old Apple devices don't think about taking the devices to the Apple Store because that's where they buy new products. They typically take their products to an electronic recycling center, or even worse, they just throw it away in the garbage. Apple may be 'cheating the system' by paying these companies to receive credit for some X amount of pounds, but it's not like they're able to force their customers to return old Apple products to their stores.
- fabulist 11y ago
  I don't see this as cheating, but we're talking about the company who convinced people "Rose Gold" was cool. If they told their customers it would be super for them to bring old iDevices back to the Apple store for recycling, I'm confident they would succeed.
  - studentrob 11y ago
    > If they told their customers it would be super for them to bring old iDevices back to the Apple store for recycling They do - http://www.apple.com/recycling/ http://www.apple.com/recycling/
    - fabulist 11y ago
      I meant more, "if they ran a marketing campaign."
ncavet 11y ago
Who cares about $40MM dollars any more.
ncavet 11y ago
Who cares about $40MM dollars any more.
coldtea 11y ago
While the article is fine, this does not really follow: >So while Apple is nominally responsible for recycling a 90 million pounds of e-waste, very little of that is actually iPhones, and very little of that is actually being done by Apple. In Washington State, for example, Apple products made up just 1.78 percent of the total weight of e-waste recycled in 2014. In Oregon, Apple products made up 1.65 percent. The author wants to argue that "very little of that is actually iPhones, and very little of that is actually being done by Apple" but the example he uses for that doesn't really show "very little", but rather a huge percentage of recycled e-waste being Apple stuff. While the statement that "very little of that [apple products recycling] is actually being done by Apple" is compatible with the example, the example doesn't really prove that "very little of that is actually iPhones" as it's supposed to. And even the implication that the numbers are small doesn't follow -- 1.65 to 1.8 percent of the total e-waste in a state is nothing to sneer at, considering Apple is just one among tens of thousands of companies making electronics, and compared to things like TVs and such, theirs are tiny and weight little (a fact admitted elsewhere in the article).
- addicted 11y ago
  1.65 % is not much when Apple makes up such a significant percentage of the phone market. But even out of that 1.65%, iPhones themselves probably make a small percentage because macs are so much heavier. The point of this article is that the media has implied that Apple is getting x pounds of gold by recycling iPhones and macs. In reality Apple is eating about 1.5% of x pounds of gold by recycling iPhones and macs. They are likely getting 98% of x pounds of gold by recycling old CRT TVs and Dells. And only a very minuscule percent of the recycling is done by Apple. He vast majority of it was Apple paying 3rd party recyclers to get credit for the recycling.
  - coldtea 11y ago
    >1.65 % is not much when Apple makes up such a significant percentage of the phone market. The excerpt is not about phones though -- it's the 1.65 of total consumer electronics waste in the state. And as far as consumer electronics go, phones are hardly the biggest... >And only a very minuscule percent of the recycling is done by Apple. He vast majority of it was Apple paying 3rd party recyclers to get credit for the recycling. How is that different than how every company that is not a recycling company does it?
qb45 11y ago
Heh, I'm officially dumb. I knew that something was fishy when the news reported more lead being recovered than gold and tin combined but I dismissed this feeling. Stupid, stupid, stupid and naive :)
frostymarvelous 11y ago
I've seen a vice documentary on Sakawa in Ghana and I must admit. These guys are smart and thorough! They actually have me insights on things I see all the time, but failed to see the implications of.
collyw 11y ago
Is Vice any more reliable? A lot of their stories look too outrageous to be true. Like this one: http://www.vice.com/read/this-guy-has-eaten-nothing-but-raw-meat-for-five-years http://www.vice.com/read/this-guy-has-eaten-nothing-but-raw-...

655 points by MikusR 11y ago

This hits the nail on the head in calling out news reporting sites who don't fact check or truthfully report a topic. Its incredible how far from the actually story the Apple recycled gold headline deviates and really makes you wonder if citing so called reputable sources is even valid in some cases.

rm_-rf_slash 11y ago
That's the problem with 24/7 news and the Internet. 1: Someone breaks a story 2: People get interested and share it with their friends 3: Other sources want a piece of that action so they bandwagon and cite the original piece for their own version. I am often struck at how our modern communications framework, going all the way back to the telegraph, has allowed so much misinformation to be spread.
- scholia 11y ago
  Some of those reporters are contracted to write five or even 10 posts per day. It's not like a NYT or WSJ reporter spending three weeks or three months on one story. Also, because Google promotes blogspam without any regard for content quality (see the "freshness algorithm"), you lose money by spending longer on a post. It's the exception rather than the rule that somebody will come along several days later and hit it out of the park, but well done Jason Koebler.
  - uxp 11y ago
    > Some of those reporters are contracted to write five or even 10 posts per day. It's not like a NYT or WSJ reporter spending three weeks or three months on one story. Vice doesn't necessarily fall out of that category either. Smack dab in the middle is the statement: "I still had outstanding questions, which I asked Apple ... The company has not yet responded." The number of times I've read a developing story that has had that or similar in it is countless. Apple isn't known to have an army of PR representatives waiting for the next question to come down the pipeline, but it begs the question of how long they waited before publishing the story and just hoping they can update the story later while it's still getting pageviews.
    - jkoebler 11y ago
      I wrote this article, I gave Apple 18 hours to respond. The article has now been out for four hours or so, and it's been close to 24 hours since I originally asked them. Apple RARELY responds to press inquiries and the only time it has reliably spoken to the press was during the recent encryption battle and that's because it desperately needed the public to understand its argument. I understand what you're getting at, but Apple loses nothing by having the original story misreported—it ends up looking really good. Apple just straight up ignores reporters, all the time.
      - rm_-rf_slash 11y ago
        When I worked at Apple I was shocked, truly shocked, to find that their PR/Advertising was mostly handled by a company in LA and not done entirely in-house. On one hand I get how secrecy works well for Apple, but on the other it gives them less control over Crystallizing Public Opinion and occasionally results in some pretty weak ads for uninspired product(s/ updates), like the 5s parts all coming together: beautiful but meaningless.
      - st3v3r 11y ago
        That really doesn't seem like a lot of time for them to respond. Especially given that for 10 or so of those hours, people are probably at home, asleep, or with their families.
        jkoebler 11y ago
        I see what you're saying—but companies regularly respond to things like this very quickly. At least to say "we're looking into it" or "can you give us some time to respond." Apple and every other major company has people on call for things like this 24 hours a day, they have email on their phone ... the company saw my questions and chose not to respond. They still haven't responded or acknowledged it.
        scholia 11y ago
        Apple's approach is to pick favorites, like Walt Mossberg, and then to play its handful of favorites off against one another. (Time gives you a bad review, Newsweek gets the next exclusive interview; or it's NYT vs WSJ.) The rest of us are generally ignored, so we have to pick up scraps from the chosen few. Obviously the big titles get more attention than small ones -- nobody has an infinite supply of time -- but companies like Google, Microsoft and Intel cope with dozens if not hundreds of journalists worldwide. They even deal with journalists that they think view them unfavorably.
  - rveeblefetzer 11y ago
    I'm a journalist; lots of my colleagues were floored watching the doc about the NYT, "Page One," when David Carr tells his editor, "I'm doing two more weeks of reporting on this, then it might take a week to write it and show it to you."
- yefim 11y ago
  Relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/978/ https://xkcd.com/978/
- __jal 11y ago
  I wonder if there's a publicity effect here. Much in the same way that police abuse has been going on forever but didn't get attention until everyone got a camera in their phone, I think bullshit "news" stories have always been with us. The net makes it much easier to debunk these, and for the news of the debunking to spread in the same way the original story did. That's not to say the insatiable, screwed up incentives to publish on the net before fact checking aren't problematic. I just question whether shoddy/misleading/outright false "news" has actually gotten worse, or whether we just notice it more because corrections and factchecks in some cases become news in their own right (like here).
- astrodust 11y ago
  It's a fundamental constant of the universe. Comforting lies spread faster than inconvenient truths.
- cooper12 11y ago
  I mean packet loss and mutation is inherent to communication though. Just consider the game of telephone or how rumors spread; the technology doesn't matter, it's our own memories and interpretations that are at fault. In this case people are too trustworthy of information from others and don't scrutinize it.
knowaveragejoe 11y ago
This is ironic considering Vice routinely bends the truth in favor of outrage porn themselves. In this case, the author doesn't appear to know exactly how much of the waste in the 90 million pounds figure was actually Apple products, though based on the rough calculation that CRT monitors make up the vast majority of e-waste weight he estimates that it is very little. That appears to be the meat of the controversy here. It's not that no e-waste recycling occurred, it's that the $40 million in gold figure is dubious-at-best. Apple paid the companies to perform electronics recycling, which the article itself says is a non-lucrative business and in large part exists solely because manufacturers pay for these recycling programs. I'm not sure if there's a real issue here(other than perhaps the media taking something and running with it for clicks).
- jrochkind1 11y ago
  I'm not sure if there's any 'controversy', the OP article doesn't seem to neccesarily think there is one, or that Apple has done anything wrong. The OP article just says that the thing everyone's saying about 'Apple harvests gold from iPhones and makes $40 million" just isn't true. It's not a question of 'controversy', it's a question of understanding what's actually going on in the world regarding our resource consumption and waste generation and where the costs of such are borne -- something we probably need to be more familiar with if we want to keep living on this planet.
compiler-guy 11y ago
Somewhat before (but not completely before) the crazy 24/7 internet-news-cycle started, I was interviewed by the Wall Street Journal about an activity I participated in. For about two days after it was published, I got calls from various lesser-known news outlets, and in the end, I did two more interviews, one with a local television station, and one with a very small radio talk show. I didn't feel that any of the three organizations got the nuances and details right in their final stories. The WSJ got the big picture mostly right, but made it look like I took a different angle than I did; the local news station intentionally omitted important facts to drive some humor. The radio program was a live interview, but moved on to the next question so quickly that I didn't have a chance to give much detail. I don't think any of this was avoiding fact-checking, or misrepresenting the truth of my story. But accurate reporting is very hard, and no news outlet gets it right. Ever since then, I take every story I see with a grain of salt. The main point might be what the subject thinks, but at the very least it is missing details and nuance. This leads me to treat the subject of any news story with a lot more compassion than it may seem like they deserve on the surface.
- megablast 11y ago
  Often they dumb down a story for their audience. While you might think it is important to talk about the issue of merging 2 branches, they may rephrase that bit.
I_HALF_CATS 11y ago
While this article is a good exception... In writing a book on Vice media I had the idea to see which american media outlets issue more corrections and updates. Vice scored the absolute worst. Much worse than Time, Gawker and Fox News. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1MQ6IiQcorsN_pnY6oX1h1K52N66mMw4crpOqVYQJiNg/edit?usp=sharing https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1MQ6IiQcorsN_pnY6oX1h... Motherboard scored the best among the Vice verticals but not well in the grand scheme of things.

johansch 11y ago

Apple misled media. I hope media learns from this.

morgante 11y ago
Where is evidence of Apple misleading media? Apple certainly never said they were making money off recycled gold.
- sp332 11y ago
  Apple announced a robotics project last month called "Liam". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AYshVbcEmUc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AYshVbcEmUc It recovers "cobalt and lithium", "gold and copper", "silver and platinum". The number "2,204 pounds of gold" comes from page 17 of this PDF https://www.apple.com/environment/pdf/Apple_Environmental_Responsibility_Report_2016.pdf https://www.apple.com/environment/pdf/Apple_Environmental_Re... which prominently displays Liam on the cover page.
  - morgante 11y ago
    Mentioning two different facts about their recycling programs on completely different pages of a holistic report about their environmental responsibility now constitutes "misleading the media?"
    - sp332 11y ago
      First, it's on the same page. The discussion of Liam starts 3 lines below the number 2204. Second, the video clearly states that the gold from iPhones is recycled. It would be clearer to say that the phone parts which happen to contain gold are put into refurbished phones. It's not extracting the gold at all, and that's why it's misleading.
      - morgante 11y ago
        > First, it's on the same page. The discussion of Liam starts 3 lines below the number 2204. And 2 lines above the gold it says 61,357,800lbs of total material, in a figure much more clearly connected than the ostensible paragraph. When Liam is introduced on that page, Apple explicitly says it is "a line of robots designed to disassemble 1.2 million phones a year." Unless you think the average phone weighs 61 pounds, it's obviously not responsible for the total material recycling chart above. Nobody could possibly read this report and come away thinking that Liam is recycling millions of dollars of gold.

wklauss 11y ago

These kind of stories are useful to understand to what extent the media has turned into an echo chamber. Everybody has to have (or comment on) the same stories than everybody else has, so fast copying (with or without attribution) has become a de-facto practice in every news outlet out there. Good for Motherboard to wait and check. Unfortunately this means we will see this article now in all the outlets that published the previous one with a hand-washing disclaimer ("remember that article SOMEONE ELSE wrote that we talked you about last week, well...")

retox 11y ago
>we will see this article now in all the outlets that published the previous one Don't hold your breath
r3bl 11y ago
I'm not in the US, but if it's anywhere similar to the situation I live in, media outlets will either: 1. Make a small apology for not sharing the truth that's not going to be very visible on their website. 2. Just ignore the facts. Their work is done, they're moving on to different stories and pretty much forgetting this one. Now, if 1st case happens, and it happens very rarely, you can bet that the apology is not going to be read by as large amount of people as the original story was. Therefore, a lie will become a "fact" in the eyes of regular people. Example: the most popular newspapers in one European country next to mine shared screenshots of a very popular porn actress's video, but claimed that it were porn videos of the (female) president of the country next to it. Of course, this was a blatant lie, the head of that news outlet made a public apology (over Twitter for sure, not sure if he did it over his news outlet), but if you ask Regular Joe, that story still remains true, because the apology made nowhere near the impact as the original story did (as you can imagine).

abhi3 11y ago

Summary: Various media sites claimed apple recycled $40 million worth of gold from iphones, they were dead wrong. What actually happened is that Apple is under statutury obligation to recycle a certain weight of e-waste depending on it market share or weight of electronics sold (depending on state laws). The e-waste doesn't have to be of the manufacturers own products. Apple paid third party recyclers to recycle mostly CRT's and PC's (iphone have hardly any gold and are much more valuable refurbished, In fact, phones and tablets often don’t count toward the overall recycling requirements in many state laws.) and probably incured a loss rather than a 40 million windfall as claimed in news articles. Original Article: 1500 words (~8 minute read) Summary: 114 words (less than a minute) The articles goes in to some more detail and analyzes the mandatory recycling laws deeper as well. There is also some commentary of how many other sites got it very wrong and overview of the e-waste recycling industry. Reading recomended if you want gain more knowledge on this. If you'd like such summaries for all articles before you read them check out: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11535695 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11535695

bobwaycott 11y ago
Hey, can you cut it out with the summary advertising crap?
- trollingineeer 11y ago
  STFU, Bob! I don't want to read an entire article.
- efdee 11y ago
  Yes, how dares he provide an interesting service while pitching his startup on a startup related news aggregator.
  - bobwaycott 11y ago
    This isn't the only time s/he's done it, and it reads as unnecessary ad spam—which is frequently looked down upon here. The same thing was downvoted in another thread. And if this user is going to continue doing it, it's going to become very annoying very quickly.

ck2 11y ago

Not that I would confuse CNN as actual journalism with investigative journalists but how many times a day does CNN say "we have not been able to independently verify" about a story, yet doesn't bother with stuff like this? How can these places claim "freedom of the press" without having to prove they are "press" or what "press" even is?

c3534l 11y ago

What does it say about the world we live in where blogs do more basic journalism than CNN? All that one would have had to do is read the report actually provided. I don't think I'm being too extreme when I say that, apart from maybe PBS, there is no reputable source of news in America. If you don't believe me, pick a random story, watch it as it gets rewritten a million times through Reuters, then check back on the facts of the story one year later. A news story gets twisted to promote some narrative that will sell papers, and when the facts of the story are finally verified (usually not by the news themselves, but lawyers or courts or whoever), the story is dropped and never reported on again. Again, if the only thing a reporter had to do was read the report to find the facts of the case to verify what is and isn't true, what the fuck is even the point of a news agency?

adventured 11y ago
I think you're being too extreme. Bloomberg, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and to a lesser extent the NY Times are all still reputable, even if they all still produce occasional junk. I don't believe there is a single reputable news source on earth, if the qualification is never producing junk articles.
- e40 11y ago
  The Wall Street Journal is getting less so. Being a Murdock owned publication it was/is bound to happen. After the purchase, the political coverage has taken a decided more conservative leaning. I wouldn't be surprised if it's also infected the financial reporting.
  - marcoperaza 11y ago
    People make the mistake of equating editorials with political news. They are not the same thing. The opinion section, the pages that have OPINION in big bold text at the top, are forthrightly conservative/libertarian, even though they have at least one regular liberal opinion columnist (William Galston) and constantly have guest articles written by politicians and business leaders of all stripes. The news sections are totally different and are pretty unbiased.

awinter-py 11y ago

they're after me lucky charms

DonHopkins 11y ago

Have other people noticed how many articles go out of their way to compare things in different units, like "30% of people do this, and 1 out of 5 do that"? It's like they're trying to make it hard to compare things numerically on purpose, so you have to read and believe the conclusion in their verbal narrative.

alexkavon 11y ago

This reminds of a great article from Blake Ross that demonstrates the laziness in journalism today. It also goes into detail about a few simple ways a journalist can investigate a topic: https://medium.com/@blakeross/don-t-outsource-your-thinking-ad825a9b4653 https://medium.com/@blakeross/don-t-outsource-your-thinking-...

nstj 11y ago

> Amount of material recovered for reuse through take-back initiatives in 2015 > Gold 2204 [lbs] [0] [0]: http://images.apple.com/au/environment/pdf/Apple_Environmental_Responsibility_Report_2016.pdf http://images.apple.com/au/environment/pdf/Apple_Environment... So is the Vice story trying to claim that "take back initiatives" aren't run by Apple? This

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ronkwan 11y ago

aapl = pretentious

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zatkin 11y ago

In Apple's defense, I would imagine that most people who are getting rid of old Apple devices don't think about taking the devices to the Apple Store because that's where they buy new products. They typically take their products to an electronic recycling center, or even worse, they just throw it away in the garbage. Apple may be 'cheating the system' by paying these companies to receive credit for some X amount of pounds, but it's not like they're able to force their customers to return old Apple products to their stores.

fabulist 11y ago
I don't see this as cheating, but we're talking about the company who convinced people "Rose Gold" was cool. If they told their customers it would be super for them to bring old iDevices back to the Apple store for recycling, I'm confident they would succeed.
- studentrob 11y ago
  > If they told their customers it would be super for them to bring old iDevices back to the Apple store for recycling They do - http://www.apple.com/recycling/ http://www.apple.com/recycling/
  - fabulist 11y ago
    I meant more, "if they ran a marketing campaign."

ncavet 11y ago

Who cares about $40MM dollars any more.

ncavet 11y ago

Who cares about $40MM dollars any more.

coldtea 11y ago

While the article is fine, this does not really follow: >So while Apple is nominally responsible for recycling a 90 million pounds of e-waste, very little of that is actually iPhones, and very little of that is actually being done by Apple. In Washington State, for example, Apple products made up just 1.78 percent of the total weight of e-waste recycled in 2014. In Oregon, Apple products made up 1.65 percent. The author wants to argue that "very little of that is actually iPhones, and very little of that is actually being done by Apple" but the example he uses for that doesn't really show "very little", but rather a huge percentage of recycled e-waste being Apple stuff. While the statement that "very little of that [apple products recycling] is actually being done by Apple" is compatible with the example, the example doesn't really prove that "very little of that is actually iPhones" as it's supposed to. And even the implication that the numbers are small doesn't follow -- 1.65 to 1.8 percent of the total e-waste in a state is nothing to sneer at, considering Apple is just one among tens of thousands of companies making electronics, and compared to things like TVs and such, theirs are tiny and weight little (a fact admitted elsewhere in the article).

addicted 11y ago
1.65 % is not much when Apple makes up such a significant percentage of the phone market. But even out of that 1.65%, iPhones themselves probably make a small percentage because macs are so much heavier. The point of this article is that the media has implied that Apple is getting x pounds of gold by recycling iPhones and macs. In reality Apple is eating about 1.5% of x pounds of gold by recycling iPhones and macs. They are likely getting 98% of x pounds of gold by recycling old CRT TVs and Dells. And only a very minuscule percent of the recycling is done by Apple. He vast majority of it was Apple paying 3rd party recyclers to get credit for the recycling.
- coldtea 11y ago
  >1.65 % is not much when Apple makes up such a significant percentage of the phone market. The excerpt is not about phones though -- it's the 1.65 of total consumer electronics waste in the state. And as far as consumer electronics go, phones are hardly the biggest... >And only a very minuscule percent of the recycling is done by Apple. He vast majority of it was Apple paying 3rd party recyclers to get credit for the recycling. How is that different than how every company that is not a recycling company does it?

qb45 11y ago

Heh, I'm officially dumb. I knew that something was fishy when the news reported more lead being recovered than gold and tin combined but I dismissed this feeling. Stupid, stupid, stupid and naive :)

frostymarvelous 11y ago

I've seen a vice documentary on Sakawa in Ghana and I must admit. These guys are smart and thorough! They actually have me insights on things I see all the time, but failed to see the implications of.

collyw 11y ago

Is Vice any more reliable? A lot of their stories look too outrageous to be true. Like this one: http://www.vice.com/read/this-guy-has-eaten-nothing-but-raw-meat-for-five-years http://www.vice.com/read/this-guy-has-eaten-nothing-but-raw-...