Biz journalists don't stoop to the level of Hewlett-Packard

Some interesting comments coming out in response to the front-page article in the Wall Street Journal earlier this week written by one of the reporters who was spied upon by Hewlett-Packard Co.

First, Peter Cohan on BloggingStocks.com wrote, “There are many levels of irony in this story. Reporters do all sorts of investigations on their subjects. I don’t know how they cultivate their anonymous sources to dig up the details that they report. But my hunch is that while they’re often snoops — peering into places where their targets would prefer they did not — reporters don’t resort to the kind of tactics (pre-trash inspections or monitoring phone calls and IM sessions) to which Tam was subjected.

“But I can’t help but think that Tam’s subjects share some of the same fears of being investigated that she must have felt when she began to realize that HP was placing her under surveillance. Her article’s cool, almost tongue-in-cheek tone does not reveal these fears explicitly, instead leaving them to the reader’s imagination.”

Read more here.

John Carney on Dealbreaker.com responded to Cohan’s post with the following: “We get the point—what’s good for the goose is good for the duck, or whatever. We at DealBreaker certainly aren’t against reporting on reporters. Actually, we’re really into it. But, look, it’s a bit of an understatement to say that “reporters don’t resort to the kind of tactics…to which Tam was subjected.â€? Uhm, that’s right they don’t. Pretending to be someone you’re not, stealing phone records and attempting to tap into other forms of personal communications are not just things reporters don’t do…they’re things that can, will and have gotten reporters fired from respectable news organizations. This is the equivalent of espionage, not reporting.

“Let’s not encourage our paranoid corporate leaders to think that H-P spying is on anywhere near the same moral plane as business reporting.”

Read more here.