[wpietri]

How I hate these stenographer-to-the-powerful articles.

The guy makes his money as a consultant to airlines; he here gives the official side of things under cover of perfect anonymity and official deniability. He does it while pretending to be a neutral arbiter of fact, showing no skepticism at all about official claims. And, naturally, he doesn't bother to follow up with the author of the blog post he responded to. I guess he was just too gosh-darned busy writing down what people with nice uniforms told him.

This just in: guy with hand in pocket of airlines believes airlines did just the right thing. What innovative reporting!

[rdtsc]

I suspect they just sent him the article prepared by DHS PR department interns along with a check.

[etchalon]

Yes, clearly it's impossible for the actual event to have transpired differently than what the person said. No one ever exaggerates things or misrepresents them on the internet.

[vidarh]

It's possible, likely even, but the extremely antagonistic way the article was written gives it pretty much zero credibility.

Especially with nitpicking like pointing out it was Port Authority police rather than NYPD - it was an irrelevant correction, as the point is he likely saw shields, and most people would have no clue about that kind of distinction and would simply assume NYPD, given that it is one of the best known police forces on the planet.

[etchalon]

The Port Authority vs. the NYPD is not an irrelevant correction.

It's two completely different government enforcement agencies, with two completely different jobs, one of which is to actually care about what goes down at the airport.

The PA's presence isn't weird. The NYPD's would have been.

[smsm42]

It's not like law enforcement agencies ever cooperated or gave tips to each other, or participated in joint activities. It's not like we just recently learned that NSA gives tips to DEA and IRS and then the latter lie to judges about where the info came from.

[rdtsc]

Right, because your stomach and head really care if they are hurting when you are held up in a room by Port Authority vs NYPD. They looked like police officers vs TSA officers.

The point remains that dissecting the blog on that level just reveals Fish for a piece of crap he is taking money to publish whatever they gave him.

[jlgaddis]

> And, naturally, he doesn't bother to follow up with the author of the blog post he responded to.

FTA (the first paragraph, actually):

I was initially approached by his supporters, and put in touch with him, to help spread his story … however … once I began researching the story, his detailed blog post began to unravel.

Unless you mean that he should have shared with Aditya Mukerjee his article/accusations/assumptions/whatever and allowed him to respond to or rebut it prior to publishing it.

[jaggederest]

> Unless you mean that he should have shared with Aditya Mukerjee his article/accusations/assumptions/whatever and allowed him to respond to or rebut it prior to publishing it.

That's typically how journalists try to do things, and it's a reasonable thing to do - that's why you almost always see "We attempted to reach X but received no response" or "X was contacted, but had no comment".

The standard is relaxed somewhat for blog posts, I suppose, but at the very least the thing to do would be to send the original author a link to the post as soon as it was posted, asking for comment, and include a note to that effect in the post.

[wpietri]

That's exactly what I mean. He has quotes from sources contradicting the blog posts. He allegedly spend quite a bit of time talking with people. Any real reporter, and hopefully anybody with an interest in publishing a fair article would have called Mukerjee and said, "Hey, let me check some things." But this article treats airline and government claims as fact.