Re: NYT on Internet Flaws

["Perry E. Metzger" <perry@piermont.com>]

Mark writes:
> >It was suprisingly weak for a John Markoff story (he usually gets the
> >details exactly right) but it is an issue that had to be brought up
> >and I see no reason to call it a bad article overall.
> 
> *snort* I've been trying to keep my views to myself on this but claiming
> Markoff usually gets things right is plain misleading. His articles are as
> about as one sided as you can get and full of factual inaccuracies. The
> Mitnik series were a farce and his latest work is reactionary fluff and
> shows his true lack of understanding of his topics.

Pardon my saying it, but thats totally off base. Until this article, I
caught him in one failing -- he did not ask the state department for
comment when he did his story on Phil Karn's CJ and only reported the
pro-export viewpoint. When I wrote him about it, he sounded embarassed
that he hadn't said he would try to be more balanced next time. Other
than that, Markoff has been a paragon of journalistic integrity,
following the rules of the profession almost by the book.

Yeah, he was overinvolved in the Mitnik thing. Who among us is
perfect? Its not like he sought it out, anyway -- Mitnik involved him,
and who among us is rational enough to take ourselves off of
interesting work under such circumstances? He's as close as you are
going to get to meeting the journalistic ideal. You aren't going to
get perfect with mere human beings reporting the news. I'm willing to
settle for someone who gets the job right nearly all of the time.

Maybe he got lazy on this last article -- some of the stuff that made
it sound like NFS was used in wide area file transfer was really
strange -- but usually he gets *all* the details right. Who else
manages that? Can you name a better reporter? I can name five worse
ones covering the same beat right now without thinking about it.

Now, if he keeps being lazy I'll naturally change my opinion. Right
now, however, he's still up there in the pantheon in my book.


Perry