[misnome]

If you are comparing apples-to-apples, then surely you should weight your statement on who to believe by how easy it is for each person to exaggerate/hide.

It's super easy for a journalist to exaggerate something like this, with relatively little risk for a massive gain. On the other hand, a "Company" hiding things involves many, many more people involved in the conspiracy, and the penalty for failure isn't really that much (how many decades of big-companies-with-bad-working-conditions stories have we had?).

It also doesn't give any sense of context - how reliable the newspaper is, what the average working conditions are for that class of facility, etc etc.

Also, again it doesn't seem (or at least the writeup doesn't) to include the information about foxconn being more than just apple, that seems to get forgotten every time there is a Foxconn story.

[paulerdos]

You raise a seemingly valid point. But, your data seems to be different than mine. Many companies, especially large multi-national ones have an excellent track record of media manipulation and the ability to successfully hide massive problems. Think about how rare whistle blowers are. Easy example that I was personally affected by: Vioxx from Merck where Merck knew about the problems with the drug but pushed it through anyway and got away with it for years. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6192603/ns/health-arthritis/t/re... . Think about big tobacco, think about Chiquita and its activities in Columbia, think about Dow Chemical/Union Carbide...

[smoyer]

"Apples-to-apples" ... perfect wording!

[cooldeal]

>Also, again it doesn't seem (or at least the writeup doesn't) to include the information about foxconn being more than just apple, that seems to get forgotten every time there is a Foxconn story.

The story is about making an iPhone 5, which is expected to boost the GDP of the US. http://www.latimes.com/business/money/la-fi-mo-apple-iphone-...

As we're constantly reminded by the Apple blogs and on here, Apple takes 75% of the profits in the phone industry and have huge margins which their competitors can't come close to, so isn't it logical that Apple gets more of the bad press for bad working conditions since they are in the best position to improve the workers' pathetic work and living environment?