Saturday, July 17, 2010

Best take on Antennagate, so far

Best take on Antennagate, so far. And it comes from Devin Coldewey at CrunchGear:
...we found ourselves groping in a dark and crowded echo chamber, grasping at factual straws and thrusting them into the faces of everyone we encountered. How little it accomplished! Apple is temporarily humbled, but they would have been one way or another. But they have the benefit of being unfairly set upon, of being able to quote hundreds of articles spewing FUD and unconfirmed nonsense — after all this, they get to play the victim card! That’s the real Antennagate.

Unfortunately, the solution is an impossible one. This is because the solution is discretion. Discretion and restraint are things that have more or less disappeared, since the benefits of being first and wrong outweigh the benefits of being late and right. The short-term benefits, I should say, in the form of traffic and popularity — very important metrics to the powers that be (advertisers and such). The long-term benefits of being a reliable source for news and analysis are becoming more and more difficult to discern, which is disturbing to me. Yet I still believe, and this whole thing has made me believe more, that perspective and discretion are as important as ever — and probably only as rare as they ever were to begin with. I’m not going to get all emotional on you here and say “oh no journalism is dying,” as if I know a thing about that, but let’s be honest: sometimes journalism can be pretty hard to find — even if you think you know where to look.

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