I don't think that's fair. They certainly have an "ounce" of credibility. This piece struck me as pretty good journalism on something pretty important, and I think it would be good for credibility all round to give them that.
Admittedly, the sources are anonymous, but could one expect otherwise given the material? I also appreciate the piece's directness, which is a refreshing contrast to the mealy-mouthed, there-is-no-truth-only-opposing-opinions cowardice of the MSM. (Of course, if you're going to say outright that someone is lying you had better be sure you are right.)
By the way, was the Techcrunch story on Last.fm definitively discredited? (That's not a troll - I don't follow these things very closely and am sincerely curious.) I was under the impression that it was left in an ambiguous state with both sides insisting they were right.
If journalism is what gets practiced in leading newspapers, then being sourced entirely anonymously is now standard practice. As for commentary and prediction, ok, if your definition of journalism doesn't allow for that, we can call this something else. Whatever the genre, this piece has some merit. Give me a reason to believe that your hate-on for TC isn't simply knee-jerk. (I'm not a huge fan of TC, mostly because I find the material boring. But the hardcore anti-TC mentality is puzzling to me. Unless it's like the hipsters who in 1990 were huge Nirvana fans until too many people started liking them, whereupon Nirvana sucked and were sell-outs.)
I stopped being OK with TechCrunch when they went after Blaine Cook personally for Twitter's reliability issues.
I can point out lots of random incidents that have caused me to write off TechCrunch (Last.fm being the most prominent). But those are just symptoms. The disease is replacing the profession of journalism with clowns like Arrington. The pathology that results is "publications" with:
* No sourcing policies
* No retraction policies
* No conflict of interest controls
* No separation between editorial and reporting
You're better off with a Murdoch paper than with TechCrunch. At least the WSJ does great reporting outside the editorial pages. Here you're disputing whether there's a non-knee-jerk reason to dislike TechCrunch, over a story in which Arrington uses anonymous sources to assert that Apple is acting quasi-unlawfully, in part over behavior that Arrington simply doesn't like. You couldn't get this published in a column in a mainstream paper.
Do you have a source for WSJ being Chomsky's favorite newspaper?
And I don't know if there's that much difference between them and the Times (except Editorials, of course) anymore. Both have very few real "reporters" who do even the basics of journalism, such as checking facts and assertions for correctness and not just "he said, she said"...
Admittedly, the sources are anonymous, but could one expect otherwise given the material? I also appreciate the piece's directness, which is a refreshing contrast to the mealy-mouthed, there-is-no-truth-only-opposing-opinions cowardice of the MSM. (Of course, if you're going to say outright that someone is lying you had better be sure you are right.)
By the way, was the Techcrunch story on Last.fm definitively discredited? (That's not a troll - I don't follow these things very closely and am sincerely curious.) I was under the impression that it was left in an ambiguous state with both sides insisting they were right.