Jumping to Conclusions

Erik Wemple of The Washington Post notes this exclusive Mountain Lion-announcement-day interview the WSJ scored with Tim Cook and somehow concludes that Apple is giving The New York Times reduced access because of the Times’s “iEconomy” investigative reporting series. Problem is, The Wall Street Journal has been Apple’s favorite publication for exclusive leaks and interviews for years. For as long as I can recall, really. The Journal, for example, got the biggest exclusive in Apple history: the June 2009 leak that Steve Jobs had a liver transplant three months earlier.

It’s certainly possible that The Times might have been granted an interview with Cook as well if they had not run the iEconomy series, but Wemple doesn’t show any evidence of that, and recent history suggests they would not have.

Jackass stock swindler Henry Blodget reads Wemple’s report and concludes Apple’s “retaliation” against the Times includes blacklisting David Pogue:

The NYT’s gadget guru, David Pogue, did get a sneak-preview review copy of Apple’s new operating system for a week, which is another favor Apple PR gives to approved journalists. But he does not appear to have gotten access to Apple’s execs, the way John Gruber and the WSJ did. It would have been self-defeating for Apple PR to completely snub Pogue, who has his own following and who generally writes breathless reviews of Apple products. So Apple’s retaliation, in other words, appears to be cleverly subtle. Did we mention that Apple’s PR team is really good at this game?

By sheer coincidence, I can report that this is nonsense. When I left my briefing with Schiller last Wednesday in New York, waiting in the hallway for the next briefing was: David Pogue.

★ Saturday, 18 February 2012