As I mentioned last week, I had wanted to write a book about the Apple-Gizmodo incident, and have abandoned it for a variety of reasons. Ultimately, it was not a book about the foibles and travels of a phone from a beer garden to a product reviewer’s home.
It was more about a free press and recognizing that online providers of news-related content are press as well. It was going to look at the world we’ve entered where each of us is press–at one time or another. It was going to look at the complexity of a free press when all people are part-time press.
This morning, I tweeted that Apple has banned Gizmodo from attending it Worldwide Developer’s Conference, where the company is likely to debut the Phone G4, some six weeks after Gizmodo scooped the company.
No one seemed to find this strange or unfortunate. One smug Canadian gentleman felt that companies should have the power to ban press the “misbehave.”
I shudder at thinking like that. If a free press needs to behave, then it is not free at all. The job of a free press is to get the story that a company, a government or another official company spokesman is trying to stop the public from knowing.
It is the duty of a free press, if you ask me, to occasionally embarrass the sources of news. The press has certain privileges so that they can do precisely that and so that the public can get at truths that certain powers would prefer to keep screened from public scrutiny.
Gizmodo is not the most lovable of organizations. It behave with a certain irreverence. It will pay off an informant even when its most bitter journalistic rivals decline.
I may not like the organization and I am not big on paid informants, although my own government seems to use them to gather intelligence.
But Gizmodo is a legitimate news organization. The public is served by it. And when one company gets to deny it access, because they are involved in a legal head-butt, then in my opinion free press is pushed back a step.
When no one seems to fin it disturbing than free press gets pushed back by yet another step, at least it seems that way to me. It is a shorter route than you think from banning Gizmodo from a trade show to banning Fox News from a While House News Conference or a field press member being prevented from covering a war atrocity somewhere.
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I think the issue here is that WWDC is two things:
1) It is a place for developers to meet together and learn the very latest just released APIs.
2) It is a a HUGE press conference.
Press anywhere is free to say whatever truth/lies they wish…. however when it comes to a press conference – I believe every company also has the right to exclude who gets the “scoop” and who is excluded.
Gizmodo will get the information that everyone else will get at WWDC. The only difference is that for there acts against Apple, they will now need to get it from secondary sources, or the delayed release from apple after the event.
Hi Shel,
Nice post, I clearly see where you are coming from.
Giz obtained the phone unlawfully (it is illegal to buy such stuff in CA) and then as a good corporate citizen it should have tried to contact Apple about the phone. We all know how important the phone is to Apple – Apple derives bulk of its revenues from the iPhone. By exposing the Phone, not only did Giz hurt current Apple revenues, but it may have a long term impact by providing a lot of information to the competition ahead of time. Now the competition has almost a couple of months to react. So, Apple has all the reasons to ban Giz.
Despite all this, should Apple have banned Giz, probably not. It does not help Apple in any which ways :)
Shel, Apple has the RIGHT to ban anyone it wants from its conference. Its conference, its rules. The more interesting question is whether apple SHOULD ban Gizmodo. I think it’s a dumb move.
Sometimes I feel about Apple the way I feel about Disney. On the one hand, Disney’s animation units have created utter masterpieces of creative art. On the other hand, Disney’s marketing machine seems utterly cynical and the man himself was less than a wonderful example of humanity. With Apple, they create wonderful things, but sometimes they just behave very badly.
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