The current AP/UB debacle gives a nice opportunity to point out how incredibly biased, stupid, and incompetent most of the popular online poker news sites are. This is obviously the sort of thing that these sites should be reporting because their customers could lose money if they're not informed about the current problem and because of a general obligation for news organizations to hold large companies accountable.

So, let's see how the bigger poker news organizations handled this situation. I just considered poker news sites that I think of as popular: Card Player, Poker News, Bluff.com, Poker Listings, Bluff Magazine, Poker News Daily, and Poker Room Review. (I left out P5s because it's a news source and a forum, and their forum discusses it but they did not post an article. All of these sites have news stories on things that happened after this story broke.) Here's how they did:

Mentioned on Front Page: Poker News, Bluff.com, Poker Room Review (43%.. Poker Room Review's title makes this pretty much a non-mention, though.)
Mentioned somewhere else: Poker News Daily (14%)
No Mention: Poker Listings, Card Player, Bluff Magazine (43%)

Explains that users are not safe to play on the site currently: Nobody (0%)
LIES and says that the problem is fixed: Poker News Daily, Poker Room Review (29%)
Runs Ads for Cereus (only ones I noticed): Poker News, Poker News Daily, Bluff.com, Bluff Magazine, Poker Room Review (71%... almost certainly higher than this in reality)

IMHO, none of their articles sufficiently clarified the situation, though both Bluff.com and Poker News were at least good enough to link to PTR's own clarification.

Here are some particularly pathetic examples:

Poker News Daily
"Absolute Poker and UB.com Host Double Points Sit and Go Weekend"

Cliffs of article: "UB and AP are running some sit and go promotion this weekend! You should play SnGs on UB and AP this weekend! Here's a long description of what SnGs are! Also, PTR found some security problem with them, but it's no big deal and it's fixed now. AP/UB have lots of great promotions!"

So, they decided to run an article encouraging people to play on UB and AP while it's unsafe to do so AND bury the real story in the bottom half of a ****ty article with an unrelated title. AND, as if that wasn't enough, they also lied to their readers and claimed that the flaw has been fixed.

Do not go to this site if you're interested in reading news about poker. Go to this site if you're interested in seeing advertisements very very poorly disguised as news.

Poker Room Review (The Online Poker Authority!)
"Cereus Poker Addresses Potential Security Issue With Software Update"

Cliffs of article: "There was some security problem with Cereus poker networks, but it's no big deal. Nobody was scammed, and it's been fixed."

Instead of writing an article about what security flaw was and how it could affect players, Poker Room Review decided to write an article that claimed that this isn't a big deal. They make sure to quote some random guy from PTR's comment section that says that this is no big deal and that PTR is scaremongering. They could've actually contacted an expert or stuck to the official statements from PTR or UB (Even UB's description of the situation is much harsher than PRR's), but instead they decided to go "Hey, look! Some guy is of the opinion that this isn't a big deal!" They of course don't quote anyone who has a different opinion, in spite of the fact that 2p2 and PTR's comment section are both almost entirely full of people with the exact opposite opinion.

They also completely misquoted PTR as saying "there are no cases of this vulnerability being used to exploit actual players." They made sure to put this quote in bold so that everyone saw the people who found this vulnerability essentially saying that it wasn't a problem. They left out the beginning of that sentence "To our knowledge," which obviously totally changes the meaning of the sentence from "Nobody's been affected by this" to "We don't know if anyone was affected by this because it's not our job to look for stuff like this."




This is obviously not an isolated incident; it's just the most recent one. There were similar problems during the big superuser scandals. I also know that most of the articles written about the stoxtrader scandal were clearly written by people who hadn't bothered to read even the cliff notes of the thread. In other words, there's a general lack of basic journalistic integrity in this world.

The huge problem with this situation is that a lot of casual players only know about the online poker world from these sources and trust these sources as legitimate, unbiased providers of news. So, a lot of players are simply not aware of this stuff going on. So, casual players are uninformed and go to less secure sites. There, they're more likely to get their money stolen in various ways. As a consequence of this, some more informed players come to chase the fish, where they are more lilely to get thier money stolen in various ways. And as a consequence of both these things, sites care a lot less about security than they should, so everyone is more likely to get their money stolen in various ways.

(P.S. I didn't link to any of these sites because I don't want to give them ad revenue. If you feel the same way, you also shouldn't link to them either.)

ALL commercial poker(news/review/etc.) sites are affiliates, and therefore biast.

tldr

but your posts are good so ill go back and read it

Its pretty obvious that the only independent and unbiased basis for news and information is right here if you dont mind muddling through all the thousand shill posts trying to distort and misinform. But it doesnt take long to figure out who is working for whom on here and the truth always rises to the surface for those who are willing to swim in the muck.

All poker media is crap anyways. They are just media whores.

The few that try and shed the light on 2p2 are our only hope.

GW Noah.

I pretty much agree. Ive stopped going to all of the "news" poker sites just cuz they are boring but they def. dont care about putting real news up just whatever gets them more money. Thats pretty much the news world in general nowadays. Thats capitalism for you though. Money>integrity all over the world which is pretty sad.

There are three obvious problems with being satisfied with 2p2 as a news source

1) Lots of people trust other sources a lot more than 2p2.
2) No post on 2p2 is as trustworthy as a decent article because posts on 2p2 aren't fact checked.
3) Finding the signal in the noise in 2p2 is really difficult.

So while you might be able to be pretty well informed by 2p2, most people who need this information aren't getting it.

Phil Hellmuth Jr. said it was OK to play. I'll believe him. Thanks.

takes awhile, you just have to know who to listen too.

also, regarding fact checking I think it is better in this enviroment (regarding the reputable posters) because anyone can rebut what you say. Where as all media, period, only fact checks through there "eyes".

agreed

Whatever happened to people feeling morally obligated to do the right thing. Everything is about money nowadays. I don't understand how the shulmans or anyone that owns one of these big media outlets can really be so infatuated by making an extra penny here or there that they no longer do the right thing for the community. These media outlets were built by people that loved the game of poker and the community. I would think at some point you would have enough boats and houses and actually have a conscience about doing the right thing. Without public scrutiny from these big media organizations, we don't put enough pressure on these big sites to make sure they are doing the wrong thing. If the sites feel like they will be ridiculed in the public to the even the most modest of players, they might think twice about trying to save a dollar on the most simple of security measures. And hopefully this will one day lead to all players being treated fairly and playing in a game of high integrity and security.

Plenty of good blogs, another debate as to if they are news or media.

Pretty sure the real news is just as bad. A news company is always going to have an agenda and bringing us accurate and up to date news is never going to be priority number 1. Not for Fox, not CNN, and certainly not for Cardplayer. It is pathetic though.

It sucks but what can we do(besides not playing on their scummy site)? I was bitching last year at all the people that knew exactly what UB/AP is about and yet wore their patches for money during the ME.

The problem is this god damn company has a straggle hold on advertising and some big name pros. They also give some good rewards for casual players. The casual players in turn make the site much softer than FT or Stars so the greedy pros take the easy way out and play on UB. I guess if we could somehow convince the greedy pros to never play on that site again it would go a very long way to destroying them.

PTR people are probably way smarter than anyone running those other sites

The problem isn't isolated to poker news sites. ESPN will continue to take ad revenue from Ultimate Bet/Absolute Poker. MSNBC will continue to promo Annie Duke without questioning her character.

Noah, you sound like an idealist and I commend that. Idealism isn't in the nature of corporate play. They are pragmatical, down to the last penny.

The wheels on the bus go round and round...

The key to this all is checks and balances. We need to monitor sites and they need to answer questions and answer to a poker commision run by players. I have zero confidence level in the indian tribe who overseas
AP and UB and other sites.

I see zero signs of changes from these sites to make me at all comfortable.
Accepting the sites word for imrovements on a compete blind I find to be an inadequite proposition. We need to send people to look at the software and
see exactly whats going on. If they are striclty working on rake I do not care what they make. Until they propose something reasonable I would not play on either site.

I would like all sites to adhere to be monitored randomly so players have peace of mind. If they are doing nothing wrong they have zero to worry about.

There's some people at MSNBC who've reported on AP/UB in the past:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21381022/

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26563848

Online poker cheating blamed on employee

AbsolutePoker.com says ‘geek’ hacked system to prove it could be done



lol

The reason for which all these 'media' outlets exist is to make money from advertising. That should answer your question.

Almost all media outlets exist to make money from advertising. I know that there are lots of flaws with all media in general, but plenty of news sources manage to avoid being as blatantly biased as the crap that I pointed out in my OP.

NoahSD, you have just put an infrared bulleye's mark on your back.

wat. wtf are you talking about

not much to contribute, but thought i'd mention that i never truly understood the power of the media until my involvement in the poker community

(random busto casino live players willing to bet their lives that PH is one of the greatest players who ever lived etc.)