Unauthoritative Pronouncements

Sunday night, an Aaron Sorkin op-ed was published by the New York Times. The piece was on why no one should be reporting — at all — on the data hackers stole from Sony. He cherry-picks some examples of salacious things that have been printed that aren’t all that worthy of being printed, and then calls anyone reporting on the contents of the stolen data “morally treasonous” and makes a NATO metaphor.

Media organizations had a very strong reaction in exactly the opposite direction — as one might imagine.

Editors, and writers for the online technology site, The Verge, were not happy with Sorkin at all. They cited their reporting on Project Goliath as reason enough to continue reporting. They also wrote a long, hand-wringing piece about the ethics of what they are doing. Monday, they ran a piece that really shouldn’t surprise anyone.

Today, The Verge saw fit to publish a headline that spelled out the ending of The Interview, along with video of it stolen from Sony.

WHAT.

THE.

FUCK.

How, the fucking hell is the end of a movie that isn’t in theaters something that should be published? Even if this was edited, it’s still basically the ending. “Oh well the film is the target.” So? Verge, you don’t get to publish the ending to score some sweet ad dollars, bros.

UPDATE

Shortly after this went up this morning, Polygon (a video game centric website under the same parent company as The Verge) posted exactly the same link-bait garbage that The Verge did. What does this have to do with games? Something-something Sony game console so reasons.

My headline suggestion for them: “You Won’t Believe The Piracy We’re Endorsing”