This took serious balls and I give these guys credit for owning up to it.

At the CES in Vegas this week the guys from Gizmodo took in a TV-B-Gone device and turned off all the TV's at the booths and even during people's presentations.

It's so cruel but great to watch. Check it out here.

But bloggers and trade journalists, so desperate for a seat at the table with big mainstream publications have it completely backwards: You don't get more access by selling out for press credentials first chance you get, kowtowing to corporations and tradeshows and playing nice; you earn your respect by fact finding, reporting, having untouchable integrity, provocative coverage and gaining readers through your reputation for those things. Our prank pays homage to the notion of independence and independent reporting. And no matter how much access the companies give us, we won't ever stop being irreverent. That's what this prank was about and what the press should understand.

This is part and parcel with the "Motorola is a big corporation so anything you do to them is OK" defense originally adopted by Giz fans.  And it doesn't make any more sense now than it did then.  No, journalists shouldn't accept press junkets from manufacturers and then write glowing reviews of products they've never used.  But there is a happy middle ground between selling out and sticking it to The Man.  It's called independent journalism, and despite what Denton and Lam think, it doesn't have anything to do with "pranks" or being provocative or acting like a child.  Real journalists are independent and fair and honest, but they don't disrupt public events to prove they won't play nice.  Real journalists don't kowtow to corporations (or consumer advocacy groups or unions or anybody else), but they don't prove their independence through irreverence, either.

There's a huge difference between Ann Compton or Don Gonyea asking tough questions at the White House and shooting Dana Perino in the face with Silly String. The former are journalists.  The latter is Gizmodo.

Finally, Gizmodo's claim to hard-hitting tech journalism is laughable anyway. Lam says this, in the obligatory "other people are worse than us" portion of his argument:

Many of our harshest critics have done far worse than clicking off a few TVs. I'm talking about ethical lapses such as accepting paid junkets to Japan by Nikon, or free trips to Korea by Samsung. Turning a blind eye to Apple's mistakes when they didn't make an iPhone SDK and sought to lock down the handset.

The idea that Gizmodo is impartial when it comes to Apple doesn't even pass the laugh test. Saying "don't buy the iPhone yet" instead of "give Steve-o all your money immediately" isn't exactly hard-hitting criticism. Seriously, go read Giz's year-end report on Apple and find anything even remotely negative. Apparently it's OK to kowtow to Cupertino, just not anybody else.

[via All Things Digital]

CES has no shortage of displays. And when MAKE offered us some TV-B-Gone clickers to bring to the show, we pretty much couldn't help ourselves. We shut off a TV. And then another. And then a wall of TVs. And we just couldn't stop. (And Panasonic, you're so lucky that 150-incher didn't have an active IR port.) It was too much fun, but watching this video, we realize it probably made some people's jobs harder, and I don't agree with that (Especially Motorola). We're sorry.

Wow is that childish. That Moto is a "lame-ass consumer electronics company" and the prank was "culture jamming" as two of Giz's defenders argue at Valleywag, doesn't make it any less childish. My children are more mature than that.  It is just the sort of lame-ass "edgy" thing a Gawker blog would do, however.  The odds that Brian Lam would care what a Z-list blogger like me thinks are indistinguishable from zero, but it's probably time to stop reading Giz.  They never publish anything that's not available on Engadget, anyway.

As an aside, it's fitting that a bunch of juvenile idiots would use a TV-B-Gone, a product for which the target market is juvenile idiots.  At a bar where a TV is on and the commercialism of the whole thing annoys you? Go home and read Adbusters. A cheap piece of circuitry doesn't give you the right to mess with other people's property or impose your worldview on the rest of us.

[Valleywag via Gear Diary]