With all the recent critical attention to Apple's manufacturing policies, it was perhaps only a matter of time before the company decided to push back. One way Apple might do this is by granting an "exclusive" to a media outlet that might put out a different kind of story than the one that people have encountered via the New York Times (1/25/12) or This American Life (1/6/12).

So here we have the news that ABC has been granted "exclusive" access to the massive Foxconn facility that has been at epicenter of the controversy over Apple's labor practices.

Why ABC? Forbes contributor E.D Kain sees a conflict of interest (2/19/12):

ABC's parent company is Disney Corporation. The top dog at Disney, CEO Bob Iger, sits on Apple's Board.

Meanwhile, the late Steve Jobs (and now his family) are the biggest individual shareholders of Disney.

Well, don't tell that to ABC reporter Bill Weir, who offers this classic defense on the ABC website. In the midst of the current scandal, the company reached out to him:

It was around this time when Apple called me. They wondered if Nightline was interested in seeing their iPhone, iPad and MacBook final assembly lines at Foxconn during a first-ever audit by the Fair Labor Association. I said yes, very much, and immediately started imaging the reasons why they were offering such a scoop to me, of all people. Among the possibilities:

-I've said nice things about their products on the air.

-ABC News is owned by the Disney Corporation and Disney CEO Bob Iger serves on the Apple Board of Directors

-The Steve Jobs Trust is Disney's largest shareholder.

-They enjoy "Nightline."

It must be the last one, because the first three would have no bearing on my reporting and I'm pretty sure Apple knows it.

Yeah, that must be it.

Apple has a reputation for being remarkably sensitive to critical reporting. It's highly unlikely that the company decided to grant an exclusive to a reporter they thought might do the kind of journalism they'd frown upon.

On the other hand, it's quite likely that they expected that Weir would give Apple the same kind of coverage he gave Wal-Mart, when he did a report for ABC World News (9/20/05; Extra!, 11-12/05) on "how Wal-Mart is changing the way the Chinese shop." Weir called attention to singing Wal-Mart workers and the "brightly-lit aisles" where "China's exploding middle class is discovering the novelty of free samples and a wide selection of everything." He also praised Wal-Mart's efficiency:

While Wal-Mart has changed the way people shop, they're also changing the way suppliers think. . . . Many manufacturers were shocked to learn that if they want their products on these shelves, it’s not who you know, it’s what you know about keeping costs down.

Apple was no doubt also pleased with Nightline's coverage (10/5/11; Extra!, 12/11) of Steve Job's death, when Weir said of the late CEO, "He was our Edison, our Disney, our Da Vinci," in a broadcast dedicated to "a visionary who changed the way we live, work and play, the man who gave us products we love and pointed the way to a future that he alone seemed able to see."

The ABC Nightline report is scheduled to air today, so we'll all be able to see if Bill Weir lived down to Apple's expectations.

If Arthur Brisbane wants the Times to consider becoming factchecking 'truth vigilantes," this is hopefully not what he had in mind.

At last night's Republican debate (1/19/12), CNN host John King asked the candidates how they would convince a corporation like Apple to employ more workers in the United States:

It employs about 500,000 people in China. It is based in the United States, has some employees here, about 40-something thousand, I think 46,000. Most of them in retail stores and at the headquarters. 500,000 of them are in China.  As a president of the United States, what do you do about that?

The candidates gave the answers you might expect--Santorum advocated for cutting the corporate tax rate to zero, Ron Paul thought the this situation might be partly due to "the union problem."

It's the kind of exchange that's rather difficult to factcheck; it's a political argument more than anything else. But the Times thought a factcheck could be found in Walter Isaacson's biography of Steve Jobs, where the late Apple CEO explained his decision to manufacture in China:

At a dinner party in Silicon Valley, Mr. Jobs told the president that the company needed 30,000 engineers to support those factory workers.

"You can't find that many in America to hire," Mr. Jobs said.

Mr. Isaacson wrote: "These factory engineers did not have to be PhDs or geniuses; they simply needed to have basic engineering skills for manufacturing. Tech schools, community colleges or trade schools could train them."

"If you could educate these engineers," Mr. Jobs said, "we could move more manufacturing plants here."

Not taxes. Not regulation. Education.

Of course the justification that a CEO uses to take advantage of much cheaper labor available in China is going to sound something like this. It's highly unlikely that Apple could not possibly find thousands of community college-trained workers in the United States.

If you really want to know why Steve Jobs liked manufacturing in China, the Huffington Post singled out a different answer from Isaacson's book

Jobs described the ease with which companies can build factories in China compared to the United States, where "regulations and unnecessary costs" make it difficult for them.

If you want to know why Apple does what it does, Steve Jobs might not be the best source. You could ask one of the company's critics, like Mike Daisey. A recent Times review of Daisey's recent Steve Jobs monologue revealed this about Daisey's research into Apple's Chinese manufacturers:

While the official Chinese workday is eight hours, the norm at Foxconn is more like 12 and even longer when the introduction of a product is at hand. One worker died after a 34-hour shift. Some of the workers he meets are as young as 13, and because of the repetitive nature of the labor, their hands often become deformed and useless within a decade, rendering them unemployable.

It doesn't sound like the substandard American educational system explains Apple's corporate philosophy. But it's apparently what the Times believes, because Steve Jobs once said so.

Remember how the media all turned negative on Steve Jobs so soon after his death? Me neither.

But don't tell the New York Times. Today (11/03/11) the paper has a piece by Alex Williams pondering the speed with which the glowing tributes turned into something else--i.e., when "bloggers began their assault."

That assault, by Williams' account, consisted of things like this:

"Was Steve Jobs a Good Man, or an Evil Corporate CEO and Wall Street Shill?" asked a contributor on the Occupy Wall Street website.

Then, on the Forbes site, David Coursey, a technology writer, wrote an article called "Steve Jobs Was a Jerk, You Shouldn't Be," in which he suggested that Mr. Jobs might have been "a borderline sociopath."

That OWS blog assault started with this: "As most of us know, Steve Jobs is a great man...." And that Forbes piece was pretty nasty; it called Jobs  "a hugely successful genius who changed the world to be how he thought it should be. That is something only Steve could get away with and we are better off for it." Ouch!

The Times adds that  "the velocity with which Steve the Saint stories morphed into Steve the Sinner stories was striking."

Evidence? Here we go:

As for the mainstream press, it cleared its throat, straightened its tie and dived into the fray with the rest of them.

Five days after Mr. Jobs' death, the British news magazine the Week published a roundup of "anti-Jobs" stories. It included an essay titled "In Praise of Bad Steve" by a writer named D. B. Grady in the Atlantic ("Apple wasn't built by a saint. It was built by an iron-fisted visionary"); a 2010 investigation in the Mail in England into the "Chinese suicide sweatshop" where iPods are made; and an Op-Ed article in the New York Times by Mike Daisey, a monologist, who pounded Apple for what he saw as Orwellian tactics ("There is no tech company that looks more like the Big Brother from Apple's iconic 1984 commercial than Apple itself").

So a British magazine's roundup of "anti-Jobs" stories included one piece that was actually pro-Jobs, as its headline and the featured quote both indicate; an examination of Apple's manufacturing that came out the year before Jobs died; and a single op-ed in the Times. Does that really qualify as the mainstream media piling on?

It bears mentioning that even people who admire Jobs' achievements believe he was a fairly unpleasant person to work for--which is excused as another aspect of his genius.

On the Meet the Press roundtable on Sunday (10/30/11), talk turned to Steve Jobs. And, as one might expect from the avalanche of hero worship that accompanied news of his death, the chatter concerned how we might all one day live up to Jobs' legacy.

Here's host David Gregory, speaking to Tom Brokaw:

Tom, it's interesting, author and journalist Jeff Greenfield tweeted recently about Steve Jobs the following: "Imagine a Steve Jobs in the auto industry, in healthcare, in energy, even in government. We'd have a different country."

We know from Walter Isaacson's biography that Jobs had some pretty strong views about how the government should work--specifically, he wanted to "break" teachers' unions, and praised the light regulatory burden on corporations doing business in China.

That certainly makes Apple more profitable. But consider this passage from the New York Times' review of Mike Daisey's monologue, "The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs," about one Chinese facility:

While the official Chinese workday is 8 hours, the norm at Foxconn is more like 12 and even longer when the introduction of a product is at hand. One worker died after a 34-hour shift. Some of the workers he meets are as young as 13, and because of the repetitive nature of the labor, their hands often become deformed and useless within a decade, rendering them unemployable.

Back to the NBC panel, where Isaacson was using Jobs' legacy to underline a point in Tom Brokaw's new book:

ISAACSON: I think that painting a vision for the future, saying "Here's where the country really ought to go," we all know the broad outline, Steve Jobs knew the broad outlines, which is better jobs, skills for those jobs, and a chance for everybody to move up. (CROSSTALK) Well, I think that we all agree that there should be a fairer, flatter taxes...

GREGORY: Mm-hmm.

ISAACSON: ...but there should also be a reduction in the inequality in this country.

GREGORY: Right.

We all agree that there should flatter taxes? I don't think so.

And Apple, for the record, seemed to think it should pay no taxes:

Apple has made money so quickly and so prodigiously that it holds an outrageous $76 billion in cash and investments--an awesome sum thought to be parked in an obscure subsidiary, Braeburn Capital, located across the California border in Reno because the state of Nevada doesn't have corporate or capital-gains taxes.

If only such a company could dominate every facet of our lives, commercial and political.