Tom's Hardware taking $$/favors under the table? (1 Viewer)

[Scott L]

A very interesting situation... apparently an editor for an AMD enthusiast site named Ryan Shrout tried to cover their products at the Tom's Hardware Million Man Lan Party, only to have the door shut on him because of a media blackout. He believes the strong ties beween the site and AMD are shady and talks about it in his report here:

Ryan Shrout editiorial

Basically, he thinks AMD is giving THG exclusive reporter rights to their new products (especially the new 64-bit CPU) in return for favorable reviews. At least that's what it implied to me.. any other interpretations please share.

So Omid Rahmat of Tom's Guides Publishing read the article and has decided to sue Ryan for liable. Since Ryan is but a "poor college studnet" HardOCP has decided to pitch in and provide legal support for the guy since they believe he is telling the truth and THG shouldn't be able to stomp out stories like this.

www.hardocp.com - read the story on Monday, June 30 first, then the latest one.
www.theinquirer.net/?article=10241

 

[Camp]

Tom's Hardware has been accused of similar things in the past. This certainly doesn't help.

There was a period when you didn't need to read between the lines to see the bias at that site. Like any magazine, take what you read with a grain of salt. Unless, of course, you're at AnandTech...that site is just good.

 

[JamesHl]

Yeah, they seem biased about various companies at various times, but they've never gone so far as to say 'well, this piece of hardware is certainly better/faster/whatever than everything else' when it clearly isn't. If they're so biased towards amd, why don't they say the athlon xp is great compared to the newer p4s? And they complain about the stupid marketing naming system just like everyone else... I dunno. You think if they were being influenced, it would show a little more.

It is kind of shady what they did at that LAN party, but it does happen that a company will sometimes choose to reveal a product behind closed doors to a particular group of people, but it's unusual in this case in that it's a seemingly public venue. Also strange is that upper management of both sides claim to be unaware.