Perhaps it’s because I get so much resistance in the day-to-day course of being a reporter that I really enjoy it when a smart journalist takes a subtle whack at a person or company that has thwarted him. Hiawatha Bray has a good example of it in the Globe today. The victim? The one laptop per child program, which apparently refused to cooperate with Bray in a simple comparison with other cheap laptops. Bray handled it pretty well, I think.
(A)re they any good? We figured the best way to find out was with a three-way hands-on showdown. The foundation refused to participate, saying it didn’t have any spare units to lend. It also refused to let us visit the headquarters and run tests.
Too bad. It could have been a contender.
It’s a good, mild potshot at the inanity of public relations methods of groups like the laptop folks. The program goes out of its way to post wikis, send press releases, talk about ethics and “vision”, etc. But when an outsider tries to independently evaluate it? Forget it; they’re not interested.
If the laptop program ever gets off the ground, what will happen down the road when some pesky reporter inevitably starts to dig into whether it was a success? Odds point to resistance, not openness. Some vision that would make…
