I still have no intention of linking to Andrew Orlowski. But Thomas Hawk did, and he quotes from the latest installment in Andrew’s public feud with Robert Scoble. Orlowski prints a damaging e-mail supposedly sent by Scoble, and he goes on to slur Scoble’s reputation and suggest that Microsoft should muzzle him. Trouble is, the text of the e-mail that Orlowski printed doesn’t match what Scoble sent. I’ve seen the original, and Orlowski’s version contains sentences that Robert never wrote.  As Thomas writes:

Now getting a source who gives you bad information is one thing, but making up emails is something else entirely. If I were the Register I’d investigate this and if it turns out Orlowski fabricated an email then he should be fired.

It’s one thing to make up quotes, but e-mails that go through corporate servers leave lots and lots of traces, all of them monitored by lawyers who are going to safeguard them as if they were about to be subpoenaed in an antitrust trial. It will  be very easy to prove who’s telling the truth, and my money’s on Scoble, who has been scrupulously honest (if occasionally overenthusiastic) in all my dealings with him. Especially when the other guy makes shit up every day just for fun.

Seriously, folks, reasonable people can disagree about all sorts of things. They can yell and scream and question the other guy’s motives and even spin conspiracy theories. But if you start by distorting the available facts and then you make shit up on top of that, everyone loses.

One of these guys is a liar. I firmly believe Robert Scoble is telling the truth

In fact, Andrew may have stepped in a bigger pile than he bargained on this time around. Scoble’s professional reputation would be damaged severely with an accusation that he knowingly lied. If that statement turned out to be untrue and it was printed with malice or with reckless disregard for the truth (which kind of sums up Andrew’s working style)… Well, you’ve got all the ingredients for a libel suit that would have any lawyer grinning from ear to ear.

Couldn’t happen to a nicer hack.

More Orlowski hackery here . Counting up the A.O. errors is a Sisyphean task. Or, more accurately, I suppose, Augean.

Charles Arthur says he tried to post a comment here in defense of The Register’s Andrew Orlowski and his trash-talking about IE7 and Robert Scoble and “got denied for having ‘questionable content’ by the comments filter on Ed Bott’s blog.”

Sorry, Charles. I just checked, and apparently in the process of cleaning out comment spam yesterday (I get hundreds or thousands of attempts per day), I added a blank filter to the MT-Blacklist database, which means that anything posted by anyone was considered questionable. It made for a very enjoyable day for me, from an administrative standpoint, but that was probably a little too aggressive. It should be fixed now. For everyone else, here’s what Charles wanted to say in response to this post:

In fairness – or perhaps, better, precision – the top sentence says “some users”. Not all. So to say, Ed, that because you’re seeing it means that everyone is seeing it falls into what one might call “observer’s syllogism” (if it’s true here, it must be true everywhere).

Also, Robert Scoble saw this problem himself. And the story has been updated, twice, once with a link to Scoble’s blog.

(Disclosure: I write sometimes for The Register; I’ve worked with Andrew Orlowski on some stories, notably about online music stores’ cut of business: his figures were correct.)

Also, I’m never sure if “hack” is such a powerful insult for a journalist. It’s got a long and proud history in the UK.

First of all, Charles, IE7 is a developer’s beta. Of course it’s going to have bugs. (I’ve got a list of a dozen so far and I haven’t even been running it for 24 hours.) But it is disingenuous to claim that Andrew’s story simply mentioned “some users.” Go back and read it. Allow me to quote the part after that first sentence, with liberal use of emphasis to point out the really hackish parts:

Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 7 went on a limited beta release today and contains a nasty surprise for some users.

Users with search toolbars from Yahoo! and arch-rival Google have discovered that these vanish. [No qualifiers. Not “some users” – all of them. As Jeremy Mazner points out, “his implication is that the ‘some users’ who experience the nasty surprise == all users with search toolbars.” – Ed] Other third-party toolbars designed to block pop-ups or aid with form filling appear to be working normally, according to reports from Reg readers.

The default search engine is MSN Search.

There are sound compatibility reasons for Microsoft disabling third-party toolbars in an early cut of the software. [That evil Microsoft disabled these features deliberately! – Ed] 

The implication of Andrew’s story is that Microsoft deliberately or negligently blocked IE7 from working with software from two rivals. It’s the modern equivalent of the old “DOS ain’t done till Lotus won’t run” canard. Which also wasn’t true.

Finally, Andrew makes the bizarre assertion that Scoble saw this bug himself and then removed traces of his “confession.” I read every post in this exchange and never saw that. In a classic Orlowski move, when someone accuses you of making shit up, the response is … to make more shit up! Andrew claims to have seen this admission (no actual quote, mind you, just a bald assertion), and a decent journalist like Charles Arthur picks it up and amplifies it.

As for the observer’s syllogism… The fact that Charles once saw Andrew Orlowski write a story containing actual facts doesn’t mean that he does that regularly. Quite the contrary.

Oh, and on this side of the pond, a hack is “a mediocre and disdained writer .” Exactly.

Updated to fix some typos and add some context for anyone coming to the story late.

Robert Scoble points to yet another grossly inaccurate story from the keyboard of The Register’s Andrew Orlowski (no, I won’t link to it – go to Scoble’s site and follow the link if you must). Orlowski “reported” that the IE7 beta out yesterday doesn’t work with the Google or Yahoo toolbars. Actually, the headline was even more inflammatory: “IE7 nukes Google, Yahoo! Search.”

That’s complete nonsense, as Andrew could have found out had he actually done any reporting or testing, but it didn’t stop him from publishing a pack of lies. Scoble assembles a small mountain of documentation to prove that this story is categorically false (and I can attest to the fact that the Google toolbar works just fine on IE7, because I’m looking at it right here). He then says:

I wonder if Andrew Orlowski will link to my blog and correct his story because his report is HUGELY damaging here.

Sorry, Robert. Andrew Orlowski doesn’t correct anything. He got this story wrong, and even a legitimate journalist like Dan Gillmor got fooled into reusing Orlowski’s distorted report. Neither he nor the Register ever corrected it.

Lawrence Lessig caught Orlowski in another whopper. The original story is still up, with a sorta-kinda-not-really-a-correction-but-an-editorial-note at the very end that just muddies the waters.

Amusingly, I used the Google toolbar in IE7, as well as the Yahoo! Search capabilities also built into IE7 to find all these pages.

Yep. Andrew Orlowski is a hack. Don’t hold your breath waiting for a correction, Robert.