I think the focus on Apple, at least on the part of human rights activists, is a function of the fact that they have the cash and the comfortable profit margin (and in some fields, e.g. tablets, no real competitors yet) that they could afford to do the right thing, whether you define "the right thing" as bringing manufacturing home or doing real reviews of their subcontractors with real consequences, require that their workers get paid a living wage, or even hiring the workers directly. Also, if you want to get something actually changed, you're far better off focusing on one company instead of going around saying "the supply chain for all electronic companies needs to be completely redesigned! Somebody should do something!"

On the part of the news media, beyond the fact that activists are steering the story in this direction for pragmatic reasons, maybe it's just bad luck or whatever, but this guy didn't lose an Xbox. The Chengdu explosion was on an iPad 2 production line. The Wintek employees were using n-hexane to polish iPhone screens. If I remember correctly, the coverage of the original wave of suicides mentioned other manufacturers nearly as often as Apple. But the most interesting fuckups in Chinese manufacturing have involved Apple products.

But since these stories started breaking, it's also been reported that, more than any other company, Apple allows their suppliers only a very, very small, fixed profit margin, and are by all accounts the most difficult tech company for Chinese manufacturers to negotiate with. Not because they make expensive requests for worker safety (and let's face it, their requests to improve worker conditions don't have teeth if they don't fire Wintek for poisoning their employees, or fire Foxconn for not putting adequate ventilation in a room filled with aluminum dust), but because they are brutal about keeping manufacturing costs down.

Last of all, there is certainly some amount of anger, at least on my part, that is specifically targeted at Apple and its Gruber-style defenders. When this is the way an Apple website reports a worker riot (especially the closing paragraphs), I want to build a time machine and ship the authors and commenters off to Cripple Creek. I can't imagine a hypothetical Microsoft fan being that willfully blind, or an HP fan, if such a person existed. It's like being stuck in a room with a climate change denier or Mark Halperin.

Anyway, yeah, it's unfair to call this an Apple problem, when it's a U.S. problem (he wrote, in his Chinese-made t-shirt). And let's face it, the west has been enjoying a higher standard of living by using weapons or money to keep poorer nations as chattel since Macedonia. Still, I wish there were some way the United States could, as a nation, pass some sort of, I don't know, like a written-down-thing-that-companies-have-to-do-or-their-management-goes-to-jail, or even a written-down-thing-that-companies-could-choose-to-do-in-order-to-avoid-a-higher-tax-burden, so the Tim Cooks of the world could do the right thing without being at a competitive disadvantage!

We're far afield from problems with games journalism now.

(And never forget Gingrich! That's what he's counting on--you'll be lulled into a false sense of security, and then BLAMMO!)