Great Expectations

Apple head of security accused of offering iPads as bribes for concealed gun permits. Shocking, I know. But, as is often the case, the headline paints a different picture than the text of the article itself:

“In the case of four CCW licenses withheld from Apple employees, Undersheriff Sung and Cpt. Jensen managed to extract from Thomas Moyer a promise that Apple would donate iPads to the Sheriff’s Office,” Rosen said in the news release.

An Ars Technica piece on the same story notes that this seemed to be a common pattern for the Sheriff's Office.

A June investigation by NBC Bay Area found that donors to Smith's re-election campaign were 14 times more likely to get concealed carry permits than those who didn't donate.
Apple security chief maintains innocence after bribery charges

I think that whoever wrote, and then whoever approved, the headline for The Verge understood that casting Mr. Moyer as the instigator would play better than "Sheriff's office tries to extract hardware from Apple head of security." The headline they went with confirms people's suspicions that corporate America is corrupt, in a way that a more nuanced reading does not. A headline casting the case as one of corporate corruption makes for better outrage mining and thus, shares and clicks.

The Verge, however, does not exist in a vacuum. It has an audience, and it has advertisers. And to the degree that it can deliver its audience to advertisers by playing to the biases of said audience, then that what writers and editors will be disposed to do; it's how they pay their bills. Whether the audience drives the media or the media drives the audience is an age-old debate. For people who feel that bias in media is the problem, there is often a perception of audiences as captive, and so if the supposed "élites" that run "the media" change the narrative, then the audiences would have no choice but to come along for the ride. But if we understand that The Verge and Ars Technica have different audiences, or, to be more precise, different expectations from their audiences, then the differences in their coverage make sense.