Cnet writer resigns after parent company CBS meddles in awards

Greg Sandoval, senior writer at CNET, resigned when CBS (CNET's parent corporation) interfered with the Best of CES award. Basically Dish Network won the award and CBS came along and told CNET to remove them from consideration for the award due to litigation issues CBS was having with Dish Network.

CBS policy is now such that no writer working in a CBS company is to write on or review any company in which CBS is involved in litigation.  (What would be hilarious would be if every tech company out there filed some small suit against CBS, resulting in CBS being unable to cover anything tech related).

For all those that say the media is bought and paid for, this is a great example of how that is not the case (and also how it is the case).

Kudos for Greg for showing the world that journalists still do, in fact, have integrity.  I'm not surprised by this as most of the journalists I've come across are in fact fair and balanced.

That said, news outlets generally are owned by large corporations and I'm not surprised, especially in this economic environment, to see CBS step in to prevent Dish getting an award. I've said this before and I'll say it again, this screams lawyers (any time you see something that makes no sense from a PR perspective, always think lawyers).

This is the type of thing you'd do for legal purposes - punish your opponent to soften them up for some kind of conflict resolution. In addition, it also sends a message to the industry - mess with CBS legally and we'll issue a blackout on you in all our media publications.

From CBS' perspective it's bad for their brand and it was a dumb thing to do. If you are going to own a media property, then you have to let them do their thing. You can't have corporate / legal interests interfering with their editorial prerogative.

If you can't live with that, then don't own the media property to start with.

Either way, this kind of thing goes on all the time in a more subtle fashion with advertising. Spend enough money advertising on a network (any network) and you'll get favourable coverage (or at least less negative coverage). There's no explicit agreement that this will happen, it merely happens without anyone needing to say anything.

Overall this doesn't really impact the news cycle that much because no company has the money to advertise across all the different media outlets out there such that they blackout all negative news. That's why younger folks get their news from the internet, because the story is always out there, it just may not be on CNN, FOX, CBS, NBC or ABC.

Either way, this wasn't that shocking of a story, but it was shocking that CBS let it get out in to the public sphere.

Was Greg smart to leave CNET? I'd say yes. If the world was filled with more people willing to stand up for what is right, even at great personal cost, we'd have a far better world to live in. The fact that most people wouldn't do what Greg did, is not a criticism of Greg, but rather a sad commentary on everybody else.