Ben Charny and Shoddy Jouralism

Catching up on some of my favorite blogs today, I was surprised to see two of the three blogging superstars I follow lambast the same journalist for different articles within hours of each other.

The hapless scribbler is Ben Charny. First, John Gruber of the wildly popular blog Daring Fireball writes a post debunking Charny’s “ill-informed” article on the lack of Flash support in the iPhone. Gruber calls it “flat-out wrong.” It is. Charny wrote in the Wall Street Joural:

Several years ago, Adobe dropped support for Apple’s Macintosh computers and then introduced other software products that were only compatible with Microsoft Corp. software.

That statement is complete fabrication. Adobe just released new versions of Photoshop and other of their applications for Mac less than a year ago, and they never took a break, either.

The article is riddled with similarly egregious mistakes.

Second, Joel Spolsky, of the popular blog Joel on Software, reports that the same Ben Charny interviewed him about Microsoft’s recent distribution of certain protocols, but completely misrepresented Joel (and very much exaggerated the benefits of Microsoft’s actions) in the resulting article. In fact, Spolsky’s own software was mistakenly called “failed.” How’s that for a nice read! Joel quotes and responds to it:

“For want of a few key details from Microsoft Corp. (MSFT), Joel Spolsky tried but failed more than 10 years ago to make a better version of Microsoft’s remote office desktop-computer feature.”
Not true. Fog Creek Copilot was developed less than three years ago and has been under continous development since then. It has been a profitable product and we’re still developing new versions.

So was just it a bad day for the intrepid Ben Charny? Were too many deadlines piling up? Perhaps, but this wasn’t a one-time slip, as I discovered. In the past, others including MacDailyNews criticized Charny for similar bad reporting, in which Charny confused viruses with Trojans. Trojan horses, like viruses, are malicious software, but they do not spread from computer to computer. Trojans are extremely simple to write, but will only affect those who directly receive the program; they have no means of distribution. Charny’s misrepresentation of the situation suggested there was a Mac virus, which was not the case.

Maybe it’s time to put down the pen, Ben.

(And now, I’d like to take this opportunity to point out that my friend Mike Kaminsky has also recently written about distasteful journalism.)

UPDATE: While we wait for the comment system to work here at alanhogan.com, why not discuss this piece on Pownce? See you there!