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January 14, 2008BELTWAY BLOGROLL
Grow Up, Gizmodo Goofballs
If bloggers want to be treated like the working press, they had better learn to act like professionals. This is an example of how not to behave:
The Gizmodo kids pulled a good stunt at [Consumer Electronics Show]: They fired TV-B-Gone remotes at walls of shiny new monitors on display and during press conferences, much to the displeasure of booth staffers. ... The video is funny. The ramifications of prank will not be. ... This prank will not endear the blogging class to either the [Consumer Electronics Association], which produces CES, or the companies that paid dearly for the right to occupy CES floorspace and show off their products.
Childish pranks like the one the Gizmodo goofballs pulled in Las Vegas this week make it tougher for blog-friendly folks like me to argue that citizen journalists deserve the same credentialing respect as "professional" journalists. I'm all for having fun, but this stunt showed an utter lack of respect for people trying to do their jobs.
"For journalists (in my mind, all bloggers are journalists), legal and constitutional protection does not extend to mischief or sabotage," Rafe Needleman wrote at NewsBlog. "Publishing news reports, opinion and satire are protected acts. Physical interference is not."
I hope the "funny video" was worth it to the Gizmodo gang, and I hope, as News.com suggests, that CEA does ban Gizmodo from next year's show. It's too bad Gizmodo's head honcho, Nick Denton, doesn't have the sense to fire the troublemakers because that is the better solution.
By not firing them, he is sending the message that their behavior is acceptable. That will encourage more bloggers to be juvenile -- and more adults who are in charge of granting press credentials, including those in political and policy circles, to think twice about giving them to bloggers. I couldn't blame them.
UPDATE: Gizmodo and its parent company, Gawker Media, have been banned from future CEA events, and more action may be forthcoming as a result of the prank. Good. I hope other bloggers who want the privileges of the press -- that's different from constitutional rights -- get the message.
Posted by Danny | 10:07 AM
Comments
Yeah, what the Gizmodo guys did was probably not smart, and definitely not nice... but it's not like this TV-B-Gone is something brand new that no one's heard of before. Protecting a television from this is basically as simple as using a strip of electrical tape -- it's an easy security fix. So any company that got blacked out by this is a company that doesn't consider security... and as pretty much everything in the universe goes online, a company that doesn't consider security is not a company that users should be supporting.
LJR | 01.11.08 10:58 AM
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Am I the only one who finds it hypocritical that the Goo Goo Ga Ga Gizmodo pre-school pranksters had so much fun with the very device they ripped to shreds in an earlier review?
http://gizmodo.com/archives/tvbgone-023694.php
John Q Public | 01.12.08 04:15 PM
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