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Comment by gigatexal | Hacker News Reader

Not sure who to laugh at or blame here really? Do I fault Apple for being a rational profit maximizing entity that thought that perhaps Jon’s show might hurt that goal or do I fault Jon who chose to put the show on Apple TV+ knowing full well they were a giant corp with lots of revenue from China? I mean, he should have known better, no?

Maybe Apple said all the right things at the beginning and then changed their tune. Either way it sucks because I liked the show a lot.

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> Do I fault Apple for being a rational profit maximizing entity

I mean, if that entity is rationalizing censorship to maximize profit, maybe you should? The alternative is blaming Jon Stewart, and eventually I'm going to get tired of accusing free speech and opinions of being the devil.

Yeah I get your point. I was hoping they’d make like Time Warner — or AT&T with John Oliver who often throws shade at the parent company but I guess all parties know it’s in good fun. AT&T is not Apple but I think it’s at least precedent.

It's platform politics, at the end of the day. It's Apple's platform, they choose what to stock it with.

This whole situation stinks, though. If Jon's being honestly transparent, it's a sad confirmation of how deeply mired Apple is in the current political muck.

Exactly. This is well said and sums Up exactly what I was trying convey and failing to.

I don't like blaming people for taking a chance on someone or something. Especially if the stakes are as low as a cancelled show.

So I guess both Stewart and Apple get some credit there. But Apple isn't making it clear who is deciding Stewart crossed a line and how that happened. Maybe it's a government? Maybe it's an exec? I can fault them for that.

I speculate that the entity responsible for The Daily Show is also a profit maximizing entity, and yet that show managed to run for years.

But they didn’t get 20% of their revenue from China.

Right, but I'm sure there were plenty of moments when Jon said things that weren't very nice about friends of his previous masters as well. People should be surprised and alarmed when American companies impose censorship because they do business in China.

I don’t think you can fault Jon too much, there’s a decent chance he saw this coming. If apple wanted to pay him a boatload of money to make a show, why not take that money with the plan always being to walk as soon as they asked him to start making compromises like this.

It was pretty silly of apple to not see this end coming though. Or, conspiracy theory time, maybe they did see this coming and decided “look, we cancelled Jon Stewart to make you happy” might get them something else in negotiations.

> Do I fault Apple for being a rational profit maximizing entity

Why not? Seems pretty emblematic of most problems in society. You'd be a fool to not see this. It's not hard to criticize expected failures of a broken system.

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