Guy Adams, a reporter for the U.K.’s The Independent, has recently been ripping NBC’s coverage of the Olympics. His tweets were becoming rather well known, falling in with the #nbcfail crowd.
“I have 1000 channels on my TV. Not one will be showing the Olympics opening ceremony live. Because NBC are utter, utter bastards,” he tweeted on the opening night.
“Am I alone in wondering why NBColympics think its acceptable to pretend this road race is being broadcast live?” said Adams before adding. “According to NBC’s commentary team, the Surrey countryside is full of ‘chateaus’.”
This was the Tweet, however, that got him suspended: “The man responsible for NBC pretending the Olympics haven’t started yet is Gary Zenkel. Tell him what u think! Email: Gary.zenkel@nbcuni.com.”
NBC complained that he shared a private email address Adams responded to Twitter’s European PR head, “I didn’t publish a private email address. Just a corporate one, which is widely available to anyone with access to Google, and is identical to one that all of the tens of thousands of NBC Universal employees share. It’s no more ‘private’ than the address I’m emailing you from right now.”
His account was restored after much media coverage of the event. “It really brought home to me as a journalist how much I rely on Twitter these days to do my job and, secondly, raised some questions about Twitter and its relationships with its commercial partners,” noted Adams.
Noted BuzzMachine’s Jeff Jarvis, “We in journalism understand the often-violated rules of church vs. state, but I think the technology companies need this as well so that we can trust them.”
“I don’t think I should’ve been suspended in the first place,” Adams said. “I don’t see how I broke any of Twitter’s rules. I think Twitter ignored its own rules… because they were in bed with a commercial partner.”
Twitter nor NBC is offering an apology and neither is Adams for his part. “It was his work email. It was easy for anyone to find. It was not written in a private format. And above all, it’s a corporate email address… I don’t think I invaded this guy’s privacy at all,” he said and when asked if he would do anything different, “No I don’t think so. I strongly believe that people who run businesses ought to be responsible for what those businesses do. And by that I mean that they ought to not ignore their customers.”
He continued, “NBC has clearly ignored what the viewing public wants throughout its coverage of the Olympics. If the President of NBC Olympics does not want to hear from the viewers… I don’t think he’s in the right job.”
As for future occasions of tweeting someone’s email address, Adams said, “Not without having a good think about it, but that doesn’t mean I wouldn’t.”
Source: Huffington Post
