Top Stories for the Week of June 22 - 26, 2009

"Are Steve Jobs' innards really any of our business?" wonders GigaOM, amid media hand-wringing and conspiracy-slinging over the Apple boss's recently disclosed liver transplant. "Does the New York Times have a vendetta against Steve Jobs?" asks Edible Apple. Questions have been flying this week since Steve Jobs' return from his mysterious health sabbatical. Last Friday the Wall Street Journal broke news that Jobs had received a liver transplant in Tennessee. Good for him, right? Live long and prosper. But not so fast! Forbes claims Methodist hospital in Memphis denied that Jobs had been there--then admitted it!. A NY Times article said the procedure "raised many questions...about the system for allocating scarce organs." Apple's "obsession with secrecy" was getting worse, another Times piece reported. Here we go again, Times blogger Joe Nocera added at Executive Suite, suggesting Apple's directors "have put Mr. Jobs's obsession with privacy ahead of the interest of the Apple shareholders." And it just keeps coming. Apple broke the law by lying about Steve's health, says Cult of Mac, quoting a professor of corporate communication. Exactly who's obsessed with what here?

Yes, as the respected investor watchdog Corporate Library suggests in its blog, "shareholders deserve to know how serious Jobs' health problems are and what impact his illness and recovery will have on the company's strategy and operations." But GigaOM says all the drama "makes you wonder whether those writing breathless dispatches on someone's frail health, as though they were auditioning for a job as Perez Hilton's research assistant, know anyone with a life-threatening illness." Edible Apple reasons: "The bottom line is that health is a private matter, and to publicly demand that someone make their private health condition known to the public is classless." Daring Fireball suggests this really seems like a spat between the Journal and the Times about who owns the story. Still, Dan Lyons argues at a Newsweek online post that Apple and the world still need Jobs: "Those lines at the Apple store today? [Apple COO] Tim Cook didn't create those." And Lyons, writing as Jobs in his revived Secret Diary of Steve Jobs, writes that the hospital's explanation won't get the media "to stop slandering me based on unfounded rumor and speculation...the hacks will just move on to the next complaint...The vultures will never leave me alone."

Moving on... it looks like Wired editor Chris Anderson plagiarized some passages in his new book Free from...Wikipedia! "We have discovered almost a dozen passages that are reproduced nearly verbatim from uncredited sources," blogs Waldo Jaquith, who broke the news and details the infractions at VQR Online. "Free as in copied!" quips The Noisy Channel. "The irony speaks for itself," snarks Gawker. It's an embarrassing oversight for the normally meticulous editor, Fast Company Techwatch says. At his own blog The Long Tail, Anderson admits: "This is entirely my own screwup, and will be corrected in the ebook and digital forms before publication." He said there was back-and-forth with his publisher about how to credit the Wikipedia passages he pasted, and ultimately a formatting snafu and lost footnotes. "The part I feel worst about is that in our failure to find a good way to cite Wikipedia as the source we ended up not crediting it at all." Ok, coolio--now you can go buy a book called Free that's packed with information you can read for free online. And in a plagiarism twofer, Elisabeth Hasselbeck of The View has been sued for copyright infringement by a woman who claims Hasselbeck used swiped material in The G Free Diet: A Gluten-Free Survival Guide "But let's get to the larger point: Did anyone ever think Elisabeth Hasselbeck actually wrote that whole book herself?" wonders Daily Intel.

Well, here's an original line: "You are glorious and I hope you really understand that." So begins the batch romantic of emails between South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford and his Argentine mistress, Maria, which The State published Thursday. Forced to fess up after an unexplained disappearance, Sanford's abject, prostrate confession this afternoon was wrenching to watch. "This is not the end of the story," The Fix says. "He appears to have willfully misled his staff and the people of the state about his whereabouts... There will almost certainly be some sort of investigation into whether Sanford misused state funds on this trip." Sanford had been a potential Republican presidential candidate in 2012 (via The Swamp) but that's probably off now. In fact, as Media Matters shows, Fox News has already decided to start calling the disgraced Luv Guv a Democrat. Brad Blog notes: "All of that follows the recent admission by the GOP's other (once) 2012 Presidential hopeful, Sen. John Ensign of Nevada, that he, too, was having an affair."

Still, the lefties do have a new place in their heart for Sanford. Says Daily Kos: "Wow. Who knew Sanford was such a romantic?" As usual, there are questions behind the questions. Why did The State sit on the incriminating emails for months, and how could the paper not know who leaked them? "Whoever had those emails had been in a position for six months to pressure--or blackmail--Sanford," notes Mother Jones. "An enquiring newspaper person might want to know more about that. The State engaged in great traditional reporting to get the scoop on Sanford's secret  trip to Argentina. But now it seems it's ready to turn the story over to bloggers."

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