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For six years, the Internet Nexus served as my technology blog, but I've since started blogging at the SuperSite Blog instead. If you're looking for the blog, please head there. --Paul

Sunday, February 06, 2005

Hide the Truth, Here Comes Leander Kahney, Part Two

It was with some reluctance that I posted about Wired reporter Leander Kahney's Jason Blair-like relationship with the truth earlier this week. As a tech journalist in my day job, I take my career very seriously. And I've been somewhat freaked out by some recent developments in my field. Kahney represents the worst of what I've seen. Still, I don't undertake a public rebuttal like that lightly. But I did it, and I understand I must suffer any consequences as a result. So far so good: I've heard nothing in the way of a reasoned defense for this guy at all, which bolsters my opinion of him. And his public "response" to my concerns--he has never answered my private emails--is even less professional than the story about which I originally complained.

But before I get into that, let me make one thing perfectly clear. My problem with Kahney was only tangentially related to the subject of Kahney's article, "Hide the iPod, Here Comes Bill." In other words, the subject of iPod use at Microsoft is a good one, especially for a writer whose entire beat is Apple. No, my problem is with Kahney himself and his fact-less approach to reporting, an opinion I've honed over a year or so of encountering his articles on the Web and then reading them collected into a horrible book called "Cult of Mac." My problem is that Kahney hasn't met a positive anecdote about Apple that he doesn't like. He's the type of guy who would walk into a random Apple Store in mid-2004, ask a clerk there if the iPod's success was rubbing off on the Mac, achieve the desired response ("oh my, yes!") and then write a 3,000 words article about the iPod Halo Effect (tm). Meanwhile, Mac sales hadn't really gone up as a result of the iPod, based on actual Apple sales data from the time. But hey, this is Kahney we're talking about. Conjecture and anecdote are so much more fun than facts, especially when you've got an eager crowd of Apple fans that want to cross-post your stories in a circle-jerk of pro-Apple ecstasy. Truth be damned.

Fine. I expect that sort of thing from the minority Mac cheerleader crowd. But when it comes from Wired ... My God. I subscribe to the print magazine. Have the inmates taken over the asylum? I mean, what's next? Major Mac advocates with a Microsoft axe to grind take over the top tech writing jobs at major publications like the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and Newsweek?

Oh wait.

Anyway. Kahney responded to criticism of his journalistic techniques, sort of, by completely sidestepping the issue. It's a classic debate technique: Turn the argument away from the accurate parts that make you look bad and redirect the argument to the accusers. Hopefully, everyone will forget what the point was. And then, if you're good at it, maybe you'll get a couple of chuckles and life goes on.

Sorry, Kahney, but I don't forget what the original argument was. And at the expense of a small part of my soul, I've elected to respond to Kahney's off-base points, one by one, even though they have very little to do with the point of my criticisms. Here's what he wrote:

The initial reaction to Wednesday's Wired News story about the popularity of iPods at Microsoft was fast and furious. Microsoft's fans -- both of them -- came out [with] guns blazing.

See, that's funny! Paul Thurrott and Ed Bott--two Windows guys, wink-wink--had the gall to criticize me. You know, even though they were right to do so.

It's particularly interesting that a guy who allegedly defends the minority portion of the computer industry would seek to discredit Ed and me because, you know, in this case, there are so few of us. After all, when it comes to who's right, its majority rules. Or something.

After a few quotes from Ed and I, we get this.

The reaction from these two was so furious, it reminded me of defensive, paranoid Mac fans.

Two points here. First, he called Mac fans defensive and paranoid, which brought a small smile. Second, if two tech journalists ever wrote about me personally like this, I'd take it to heart. And even if I felt they were wrong, I'd at the very least address the issues they raised. His response, of course, can be seen by one and all on his blog. It's very professional, isn't it?

A lot of e-mail reaction was the same, but that's not unusual...

Whoa. He got "a lot of email" complaining about his horrible article too? And yet he called Ed and I "both of Microsoft's fans." Classic. Looks like he took another fact and just completely ignored it. In other words, it wasn't "both of Microsoft's fans" complaining, it was "a lot of" people complaining. And he still felt compelled to ignore those complaints. Fascinating.

... You only hear from people who are purple with rage.

Put more correctly, Kahney only hears from people who are purple with rage. I actually hear regularly from people who are excited to have discovered one of my Web sites and are writing in to thank me in general, to thank me for answering a particular question or for addressing a particular topic, or to ask me a question. Yes, I do get complaints. But they are the minority. Interesting. I'd have expected the Mac fan boys to simply shower this guy with wine, women, and song. In fact, I sort of figured that was his entire point in life.

And about that rage thing. There's no rage, sorry. I'm never purple. Yes, what Kahney does is wrong, and it bothers me. And I wrote about that. But don't assume I'm stalking around the house raging like the Incredible Hulk when I read something like that. It's more of a raised eyebrow or, in Kahney's case, the occasional, "Huh? What?" uttered out loud. There's no purple rage, sorry. It's called confusion.

Kahney quotes a few emails, gets yet another opinion that iPod usage is less than what Kahney reported--again, by another guy, like Ed and I, who actually visits the campus regularly--and ... blows it off yet again. Remember, Kahney's not interested in anything that contradicts the point of his story. And again, that is my problem with this guy. So he finds someone who believes the story Kahney wrote. His name is Danny Ngan. He's an animator, which sounds like a job a Mac fan would appreciate. Has Ngan ever been to Microsoft's Redmond campus? No, but he's been to the Millennium Campus, 15 minutes east of the Redmond campus, and he "suggested" Kahney's estimate "might be right."

Seriously. Let that sink in for a second.

But my favorite bit from the Kahney "rebuttal," and let's face it, folks, he didn't rebut a thing, is his final little dig at me. Here it is, in its entirety:

I'd forgotten, but Thurrott and I have some background. Last year, I countered one of his stories about HP and the iPod, which earned him some criticism from third parties like John Gruber: "Unlike Thurrott, Wired News reporter Leander Kahney actually spoke to someone at HP."

That, too, is funny. But here's what really happened. Last year, at CES 2004 in January, HP announced that it was licensing the iPod from Apple, in an unexpected move that raised some legitimate questions about how HP's many other WMA-based products were going to interoperate with the HP iPod, which supports just the AAC and MP3 formats, and not WMA. I was critical of that decision.

HP announced this move at CES. I was at CES, along with Keith Furman, another news editor from the magazine, and--voila!--we were scheduled to meet with HP a few different times at the show. So we asked an old friend and contact from HP there about the iPod, and were told point blank that HP was working to get WMA support into the iPod by the time HP released its device. I wrote a blurb about it--a two sentence blurb, mind you, not an article--in WinInfo and that was that. What I wrote was accurate. That's what we were told. By an HP representative. In person. To two reporters. At a trade show. During a meeting. Getting the picture?

Well, history records that neither Apple nor HP ever added WMA support to the iPod. Kahney, at the time, had asked an HP representative whether they had plans to do so, and that person told him no. I--in the presence of Keith--was told by an HP representative that they would. So what happened? I think it's pretty clear now that Apple got a highly favorable deal in which HP left its customers hanging with regards to interoperability. HP later did create some horrible Media Center-like software that it shipped in late 2004, but that only works for new Media Center customers, not all of the people who currently own WMA-compatible PCs, Media Center PCs, Pocket PCs, digital media receivers, and other devices. HP was stymied by Apple.

So did I "lie" about this discussion? No. But that doesn't stop Kahney from making it look like I did. And this is my favorite part. To "prove" this, he quotes a blog posting by a "third party"--that is, some joker out there on the Web who never speaks to representatives of HP, Apple, Microsoft or any other relevant company as proof. "Unlike Thurrott, Wired News reporter Leander Kahney actually spoke to someone at HP," he wrote at the time. That's a great quote. A great quote. Too bad it's not true.

You know what the funniest part about all this is? When Kahney wrote his little screed about me a year ago, I tried to contact him and set the record straight. You'll be unsurprised to discover he wasn't interested. And a year later, here we are again. Mac fans probably thought that the score was Kahney 2, Thurrott 0. There's just one problem. With the truth, we have instant replay. And the refs will get this one right.

So let's recap. Rather than address my legitimate issues, Kahney provided a few more anecdotes and, if I might be so bold, a few bald-faced lies. That makes him a bad guy in my book. And heck, you might think I'm bad guy too, just for brining this up. OK. I'm sorry you feel that way. But I answer complaints. I don't side-step them. And I certainly don't present opinions as facts. There's a big difference between this blog--which is, by definition, one giant opinion--and Wired News. And I feel that Wired News should either clearly label Kahney's writings as the pure conjecture and opinion they are, or simply require him to report the facts. I suspect Kahney's response to this will be silence or another round of cute name calling. Why? Because the only real way to respond to this is to own up to the truth, and Kahney is clearly incapable of doing that.

[ Posted at 10:30 AM | Permalink ]