There are companies with divisions that spend billions of dollars on entertainment. There are also companies with divisions that review new gadgets and sometimes champion the spectacular ones — even those that challenge the status quo.
And when those divisions are owned by the same company, there is a chance that they will wind up in the kind of predicament that the CBS Corporation found itself in last week.
A senior writer for CNET, the technology news Web site owned by CBS, resigned on Monday after the site was barred from presenting an award to a company being sued by CBS. Greg Sandoval, a former reporter for The Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times who has spent the last seven years at CNET, said on Twitter that he no longer had confidence “that CBS is committed to editorial independence.”
Mr. Sandoval did not respond to an interview request. His resignation announcement came half an hour after another technology news site, The Verge, laid bare the details of the conflict.
The case started to unfold on Jan. 9, when CNET’s employees did something they do every year: cast votes for the Best of C.E.S. Awards, the official awards program of the Consumer Electronics Show. For the Best in Show award, the employees chose the Hopper, a digital video recorder sold by Dish Network that allows users to skip ads on prime-time network television shows. Dish had showed off the newest version of the Hopper at C.E.S., and CNET’s reviewers were impressed by it.
But CBS claims the Hopper is illegal. Along with several other network owners, it went to court last year over the ad-skipping feature; the litigation is pending.
The vote created a “legal conflict for CBS,” the CNET editor in chief, Lindsey Turrentine, said in an editorial on Monday afternoon that confirmed the substance of The Verge’s article. (The site suggested that “CNET’s reviews could be used by Dish in court to embarrass CBS or possibly refute the company’s evidence.”)
“All night and through to morning,” Ms. Turrentine wrote, “my managers up and down CNET fought for two things: to honor the original vote and — when it became clear that CBS corporate did not accept that answer — to issue a transparent statement regarding the original vote.”
But her managers were overruled. The case went all the way to the CBS chief executive, Leslie Moonves, who said that CNET should disqualify the Hopper and choose a new award winner.
CNET acquiesced. When it announced the winners on Jan. 10, CNET acknowledged that the Hopper was “removed from consideration due to active litigation involving our parent company,” causing an outcry by the Dish chief executive, Joe Clayton, who said Dish was “saddened that CNET’s staff is being denied its editorial independence because of CBS’s heavy-handed tactics.”
But CBS did not allow CNET to reveal that the Hopper had won Best in Show before being removed; when The Verge reported that on Monday, further cries of censorship sprang up on the Internet. Ms. Turrentine said she wished she could have overridden CBS’s decision. “For that I apologize to my staff and to CNET readers,” she said.
Mr. Moonves declined an interview request, but a statement from CBS called the case “isolated and unique” and noted that the Hopper “has been challenged as illegal” by it and other major media companies. The statement added, “In terms of covering actual news, CNET maintains 100 percent editorial independence, and always will.”
A version of this article appeared in print on 01/15/2013, on page B7 of the NewYork edition with the headline: CNET Clashes With Its Owner, and a Reporter Resigns.
Media Decoder: Resignation Suggests Rift Between CNET and CBS
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Media Decoder: Resignation Suggests Rift Between CNET and CBS
