Assuming that Declan’s explanation for how the Angelides campaign got the Schwarzenegger audio is right (and it’s consistent with everything I’ve seen on the subject), the media coverage of the story is incredibly lazy. Whether the Angelides campaign’s actions constitute “hacking” or not is not a complicated question. The way to answer it would be to get a precise description of what they did from the two campaigns (the Schwarzenegger campaign says they have logs of the access, so they should be able to answer specific questions about it), and then to ask a computer expert whether that specific sequence of actions constitutes hacking.
Yet not one of those stories features a quote from a computer science professor, a webmaster, or anyone else with technical expertise in administering web sites. Each and every reporter takes an agnostic stance, as if it’s a complex and difficult question that will take days of painstaking research to answer. It seems to me that this does their readers a disservice.
Presumably, the idea here is that a “balanced” story is one that faithfully reports the opinions of each side, without passing judgment on either side’s position. This is appropriate in cases where the statements in question are matters of opinion. But a good journalist should do some independent research to verify assertions that are matters of fact. If candidate Smith says the sky is blue, and candidate Jones says it’s green, the good reporter looks up at the sky and reports on what color it looks like to him, he doesn’t pretend that the color of the sky is a matter of opinion.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.