Michael Arrington of TechCrunch wants to know why more journalists haven’t quit tech news site CNET in the wake of parent company CBS Corp. decreeing it couldn’t give an award to a company that CBS was litigating.
Arrington writes, “What I don’t get is why CNET staffers have stuck around. They’re the ones who are supposed to be journalists and all that entails. They’re the ones I blame right now.
“I blame them because they’re the only reason CBS is able to get away with this. Every single journalist at CNET should have resigned by now.
“More than once at TechCrunch we made AOL extremely uncomfortable with things that we wrote. But they never ordered us to write or not write about something because they understood that not only would we not comply, we’d write a post about the whole thing.
“Our independence from AOL was so important to me that I negotiated an extremely odd provision in our purchase agreement that allowed me to disclose confidential information about AOL. It was their job never to give me that information. It was not my job to protect it in any way.”
Read more here.
