Leo LaPorte says what we’re all thinking…finally.

I’m no big fan of Leo LaPorte. While I consider him an honest and genuine reviewer and host, I find watching his show “The Lab with Leo” on G4TechTV to be irritating at best and frustrating at worst. The only thing I can imagine being more annoying that watching Laporte would be being a guest on his show; he habitually ends his guests’ sentences for them and guides his interviews with all the deft grace and subtlety of a punch in the face.

But he’s no Mike Arrington.

Arrington, who has been the topic of articles in Forbes, Wired and Time Magazine and has been called “one of the most powerful people on the Internet” runs the popular blog TechCrunch, and is well-known for his particular brand of sensationalized journalism. Case in point, as of 1:52 AM on Monday June 8, TechCrunch’s top 4 articles include “The Morality And Effectiveness Of Process Journalism“, a revenge piece spat back at Damon Darlin for his piece in the New York Times entitled Get the Tech Scuttlebutt! (It Might Even Be True.) in which he was apparently misquoted, a conclusion I reached based on this Arrington Tweet:

@(follower) did Damon Darlin at the NYTimes do a fair job of quoting you in http://bit.ly/zppEn ? Totally fucked me. I’m hitting back.
4:51 PM Jun 6th

The other article I enjoyed was a piece titled “What’s In A Name? That Which We Call An “iPhone 3GS” By Any Other Name Would Smell As Sweet” by MG Siegler, a TechCrunch staffer, in which he spends 750 words speculating that the potential new name for the next iPhone is “kind of lame”. You can’t make this up, people.

Interestingly enough, the Times article that’s got Arrington all hot and bothered echoes some of the very same sentiments we’ve shared around the rgbFilter offices; the write-first-research-later method of blogporting (if it wasn’t a word before, it is now) employed by so many respected organizations is frustrating at best, and irresponsible at worst. Darlin sums up his thoughts, and echoes mine, very succinctly:

(regarding a rumour picked up by TechCrunch and Gawker) Neither story was true. Not that it mattered to the authors of the posts. They suspected the rumor was groundless when they wrote the items. TechCrunch noted, 133 words into its story, that, “The trouble is we’ve checked with other sources who claim to know nothing about any Apple negotiations.”

But they reported it anyway. “I don’t ever want to lose the rawness of blogging,” said Michael Arrington, the founder of TechCrunch and the author of the post.

So it is with no small amount of personal satisfaction that I applaud Mr. Laporte for telling it like it is when Mr. Arrington accused him of giving the Pre a positive review simply due to the fact that Laporte got a free one from Palm and Arrington didn’t. If you watch the video above, you’ll hear Arrington ask LaPorte a perfectly valid question in the interests of full disclosure, get a perfectly valid answer, and then press the issue, implying that LaPorte’s integrity was in question. To do that to a colleague is bad enough, but to do so during a live podcast gives me serious douchechills. I also applaud Mr. Laporte for his professionalism after the fact (even if it was conspicuously absent during the show), even though Mr. Arrington gave him absolutely no reason to do so. In the inevitable follow-up apologyathon, Arrington posted a letter on TechCrunch entitled “Ouch” so littered with backhanded self-service and buck-passing that it often strays far from the point, going as far as to suggest that even if LaPorte did get the Pre as a review device, he’d probably just end up keeping it, anyway:

Getting a high profile device in advance is a huge advantage, and is a conflict of interest that should be disclosed in our opinion. But the catch is this – as long as Palm sends out a letter with the device asking for it back in a week, it isn’t considered a financial conflict of interest. The fact that few people ever return them is rarely brought up.

Now I’ve never been in Time Magazine so take my thoughts here with a grain of salt, but seems to me, if you’re apologizing for calling someone’s integrity into question, you don’t take a half-assed swipe at their integrity in the process.

Just sayin’.

Leo LaPorte’s blogs, articles, radio and television projects can be found at Léoville.

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