So, it’s not acceptable to poke gentle fun at a politician, and it’s not acceptable to make an app that helps people promote health care reform.
But it is perfectly all right to make an app that spreads the “talking points” (a nice phrase for propaganda) generated by a handful of cable TV news hosts, Washington columnists, and think-tank lobbyists.
Sounds like crazy talk, yes? See this story in the Atlantic.
Here’s an excerpt:
America’s political civil war has hit the iPhone… The First Shot over the Liberal Bow has been fired!… Be armed with the Conservative Talking Points iPhone App as your powerful arsenal to debate those emotional and ill-prepared liberals… conduct this war on ignorance and liberal idiocy.
This is practically an incitement to violence, especially compared to the light-hearted harmless mocking of President Bush that was in our app. Steve Jobs dismissed our iPhone app as possibly alienating “half” of his customer base and said “what’s the point?” I have to ask if our Mickey Mouse cartoon of Bush was incindiary, what’s the point of this app that derides people while referring to an ideological “civil war” using violence as its only metaphor?
Furthermore, a screen shot from the Atlantic page shows an article on Fascism, trying to paint the current administration as fascist. This is the worst kind of right-wing propaganda that redefines the terms to their opposite. Another screen shot says:
Help us defeat the liberal fascists attempting to take over America!
To date this is perhaps the best example to date of Apple’s myopic App Store policies. What are we to think, that Apple only approves “politically charged” apps associated with extreme right-wing causes? Has Ann Coulter infiltrated Cupertino? Is Steve Jobs staying up late watching Glenn Beck? It’s really, really hard to imagine a universe in which Apple allows this kind of evil crap through, but not something as harmless as Freedom Time.
I have never seen a more obvious case of bias in my life.
App Store Fail. Once again.
[Edit: I just added more detail describing the content of the App.]
