There’s a moment in 2001: A Space Odyssey when the alpha ape flings a bone into the air and it turns into a space shuttle. Roger Ebert calls this the “longest flash-forward in the history of the cinema.” Following the saga of Gizmodo and the Apple iPhone I came across a worthy rival.
“He reached for a phone and called a lot of Apple numbers and tried to find someone who was at least willing to transfer his call to the right person, but no luck. No one took him seriously and all he got for his troubles was a ticket number.
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That cues the flash-forward. “Weeks later,” Diaz continues, “Gizmodo got it for $5,000 in cash. At the time, we didn’t know if it was the real thing or not. It didn’t even get past the Apple logo screen. Once we saw it inside and out, however, there was no doubt about it. It was the real thing.”
Of course, there were Gizmodo readers who promptly did just that. John Gruber writes Daring Fireball, a blog devoted to scrutinizing all things Apple. The outing of Gray Powell, he wrote on April 22, was “the dick move to end all dick moves. . . . The people whose identities I’d like to know are those who obtained and then sold the phone, not the guy from Apple who lost it.”
Which, Gruber went on, would expose Gizmodo, if it knew what it was buying (something Gruber had no doubt about), to the criminal charge of “purchase and receipt of stolen property.” He wrote, “It simply boggles my mind the stakes they have effectively wagered that Apple will not pursue this legally.”
Gaby Darbyshire is chief operating officer of Gizmodo’s parent, Gawker Media. Her response to the REACT raid was a stiff letter to the detective who led it, Matthew Broad of the San Mateo police force. Darbyshire identified Chen as “a journalist who works full time for our company” and then led Broad on a brief tour of California’s shield laws. She asked Broad if he was aware that under the California penal code “no warrant shall issue for any item or items described in Section 1070 of the Evidence Code,” and that Section 1070 states that no journalist can “be adjudged in contempt by a judicial, legislative, administrative body, or any other body having the power to issue subpoenas, for refusing to disclose . . . the source of any information procured” while acting as a journalist.
Must we regard Gizmodo’s exercise in self-glorifying flackery as journalism? Yes we must. Apple’s security lapse is a genuine news story, and so is the design of the next generation iPhone. When journalists find out that sort of thing we expect them to tell us about it—it’s what they do. Journalists have been vague and dissembling and self-congratulatory about how they got that story ever since Gutenberg.
