Quoting Steve McIntyre <steve@einval.com>:
[snip] Here's the full body of the message I sent to Sam. He contacted me asking for my thoughts and I wrote the following: =================================================================== On Tue, Dec 16, 2008 at 08:53:24AM +1100, Sam Varghese wrote: [snip]I am shortly running a story about the sexist post by Josselin Mouette and the fallout of the same.[snip] I assume you're talking about Josselin's post to debian-devel-announce on the 23rd of November [1]. Joss is, unfortunately, rather fond of posting his own brand of "humour" when he wants to make a point, and in this case his post was both ridiculously off-topic and juvenile. Quite a number of people took exception to the content of his message, as you've probably seen from the following discussions. I don't believe he was actually trying to be *directly* offensive in what he wrote, but his judgement is clearly not the best. After his abuse of the ability to post to the d-d-a mailing list, I asked our mailing list administrators to remove that privilege for in future.
Steve's message was quite accurate and neutral. I think he did a good job job here as DPL. However, Sam Varghese has horrendously broken the basic rules of good journalism in his article. Starting with the title "Debian developer loses privileges due to offensive post", he suggests that Josselin has been actually punished by Debian, which is not the case. Second, he says that Joss' post to d-d-a was offensive and sexist. Had he read the whole thread in debian-devel, he would have seen that many developers disagreed with this opinion and have pointed out that the post was satirical in the first place. As regards the choice of the forum, even Josselin agreed that posting in d-d-a was a bad idea and sent his apologies. Finally, Sam Varghese must had contacted Josselin and asked him his opinion. Getting the opinion of all parts involved is a basic rule of journalism, isn't it? I am profoundly disappointed with the lack of professionalism of people acting in an Internet news organisation, like ITWire. -- Rafael Laboissiere ---------------------------------------------------------------- This message was sent using IMP, the Internet Messaging Program.