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Aug 3 / Ozymandias

Rose-colored Glasses

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I’m always fascinated (and frightened) by how easily the tone of a story can be changed with some selective quoting. Take one of today’s stories, variants of which ran on both Joystiq and Next-gen’s websites.


Both sites used a Guardian Unlimited story as a source, and both also used the same quote from Phil Harrison:


“It’s all going well. We are in full swing, from a developer point of view, and over 10,000 development kits have been shipped. Developers now have final hardware in their hands, though there will be some upgrades to the operating system – there’s nothing unusual about that. The new controller is now in developers’ hands, so all the pieces of the puzzle are there.”


And just as interesting? Both sites ignored the other 99% of the article, which was quite negative. A person who read either of the above articles and never went back to the original source article would most likely have a very skewed perception of what the Guardian had written. I’m actually somewhat surprised that Next-gen didn’t go deeper in particular, but perhaps they were having an off day.


I’m not going to quote the Guardian article simply because that’s not the intent of this post. You’re welcome to go read it, of course, but it doesn’t say anything that hasn’t been said a million times over the last six months. As I’ve said before, I might just be hyper-sensitive to this, but in my opinion it’s always worth going back to the original source where possible. Unfortunately, in this hyper-competitive world of instant-blog-journalism this sort of thing happens all the time.


Right! Off my high-horse! Wink

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