The Consumer Electronics Association cut its ties with CNET on Thursday, two weeks after CNET’s parent company, the CBS Corporation, prohibited the Web site’s editors from giving an award to an innovative product it deemed illegal.
The association retroactively gave the award to the product in question, the Hopper, a digital video recorder sold by Dish Network that allows users to automatically skip all the ads on prime-time network television shows. The newest version of the product uses technology from a company called Sling that lets customers wirelessly watch recorded shows away from home.
“The CNET editorial team identified the Hopper Sling as the most innovative product of the show, and we couldn’t agree more,” said Karen Chupka, a senior vice president at the association, in a statement. So the Hopper will share the Best of Show award with the product that CNET begrudgingly picked as a backup, the Razer Edge gaming tablet.
The association’s announcement was a stern rebuke to CNET, a longtime partner of the association’s annual conference, the International Consumer Electronics Show. The official name is International CES. CNET will no longer host the Best of CES Awards, Ms. Chupka said; the association is seeking a new partner for it.
Mark Larkin, the general manager of CNET, did not comment directly on the association’s decision, but he said in a statement: “As the No. 1 tech news and reviews site in the world, CNET is committed to delivering in-depth coverage of consumer electronics. We look forward to covering CES and the latest developments from the show as we have for well over a decade.”
The spat over the Hopper was, among other things, a proxy fight between CBS and Dish, which are battling in court over the legality of the Hopper. Dish says the product is perfectly acceptable and addresses what consumers want; CBS says it violates copyright. The case is pending, as are several other network owners’ cases against Dish. Last week CBS revised its lawsuit to accuse Dish of covering up its plans for the Hopper during carriage negotiations between the two companies.
When CBS executives learned that the CNET staff had voted to give the Hopper the Best in Show award, they vetoed the editorial decision, fearing it would undermine the company’s lawsuit. CNET staff members tried and failed to resist, and later conducted a revote that resulted in the Razer Edge’s being named the winner. The outrage at CNET spilled into public view a few days later, and one senior writer resigned in protest.
CBS sought to portray its interference with the awards as a one-time-only incident. In a recent statement the company said: “CNET is not going to give an award or any other validation to a product which CBS is challenging as illegal, other networks believe to be illegal and one court has already found to violate the copyright act in its application. Beyond that, CNET will cover every other product and service on the planet.”
But the Consumer Electronics Association, which represents manufacturers of products like the Hopper, has backed Dish in the argument. It filed a brief in support of Dish with the court last week, and its president, Gary Shapiro, pounded CBS in a column in USA Today this week.
“CBS, once called the Tiffany network, will never be viewed again as pristine,” he wrote. “The ethical media rule is that corporate business interests should never interfere in journalism — or at least not so blatantly, publicly and harmfully. It made me wonder if ’60 Minutes’ had ever suffered the same treatment.” He asserted that the company’s interference also hurt CNET because “users and partners like us” have “lost confidence in its independence.”
CBS says that’s not true.
Dish, for its part, used the association’s announcement on Thursday to take another shot at CBS. The Dish chief executive Joseph Clayton said he appreciated the re-awarding of the Hopper but regretted that it “has come in the face of CBS’s undermining of CNET’s editorial independence.”
He added, “We look forward to continuing our longstanding relationship with CNET’s editorial staff and hope they are able return to their long tradition of unbiased evaluation and commentary of the industry’s products and services.”
Article source: http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/01/31/cbs-fight-with-dish-spills-over-to-cnet/?partner=rss&emc=rss
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