To be honest, Dave’s Apology to Radio Users it was more than I expected, but it was framed in a very misleading and dishonest way. He did his spinning over at FriendFeed:
One more thing — it’s pretty obvious Arrington attacked me as a response to a piece I wrote the day before about Twitter giving flow to various friends, like TechCrunch. I went out of my way to say TC didn’t do anything wrong. Didn’t want to make it personal, cause it wasn’t. And then Mike comes back with this. I don’t think it’s a coincidence.
Problem is, Arrington’s piece makes explicitly clear why Dave was being singled out, and it wasn’t because he called out TC. It was, in essence, the same reason that we called him out a few weeks ago.
What’s great is watching Dave try to explain that Curry’s feed was appropriate and should’ve been included anyway. He calls the $10,000 payment a “gratuity”. One of two things is true: he thought Curry’s feed belonged there but let a friend pay him $10k for it anyway or he had no intention of including Curry until he got the payola. He can’t have it both ways. He’s either a jerk of unimaginable proportions or he’s lying through his teeth. Not that those two things are mutually exclusive.
Dave’s “apology” is also incredibly weak on its face. After spending weeks bitching and moaning about not being included on Twitter’s suggested users list (what, does anyone actually believe this is about some deeper issue?) and making all sorts of insinuations about Twitter and the folks who got suggested user list spots he glosses over a much more egregious and ethically bankrupt action of his own with “I apologize for that.”
I’m not sure that Arrington’s comment about Winer’s lack of credibility is quite accurate though, as it seems to imply that this is a new phenomenon. Dave hasn’t had any for quite some time — it’s a side-effect of having no integrity, actually, something I imagine is just a product of his up-bringing.
Tags: Hypocrite, Mike Arrington, TechCrunch, Twitter
There is a link between Dave’s continued quixotic crusade to promote the idea of Twitter-as-the-only-legitimate-news-source and his problems with the Twitter SUL. See, only if you accept the premise that Twitter is primarily a journalistic outfit can you make the claim that the SUL represents a conflict of interest. After all, if its just the incoherent 140-character babblings of the masses, what’s to complain about if one user is “given” 10k followers? So what if they don’t Tweet critically about Twitter because they feel obligated? The only reason a conflict exists is if tweeting carries some artificial burden of journalistic integrity. It does not, which is why Dave’s insistence that it does makes so little sense when applied to the real world.