A sidenote to the HP saga is the attention the business publications that were pretexted are paying to themselves in their coverage. Today Business Week tells us that “BW Writers Targeted by HP” and on Friday CNet said “HP probe snared a third News.com reporter”. Contrast this with the WSJ’s coverage (“Reporters’ Records Targeted in H-P Probe”) and the NY Times coverage coverage (“Hewlett-Packard Spied on Writers in Leaks”), both of which addressed surveillance of their own reporters’ records. It strikes me as at least a little odd that these publications would think that I would be interested in how this story was affecting them in particular, as opposed to the media generally.
And perhaps stranger still, though I can’t now find the reference, was a story yesterday that reported that the WSJ had no comment to another publication calling to ask about it’s writer being pretexted. If the media is the story, reporters are going to come calling. “No comment” seems a strange way for a newspaper to respond to them.