ARTS & FARCES internet

Most people with chronic health problems are much more private about their health conditions than I’ve been. I made the decision early on that I would operate in full disclosure mode about my health. This wasn’t a gradual process with me. I was all-in from the start. But make no mistake; the choice to disclose was mine and mine alone.

It took me a couple of years after my kidneys failed in 2000 to figure out that my days of working 16-18 hours every day were over. I researched what my obligations were with regard to disclosure and found that there basically were none. But I felt something—not really a moral obligation—but something that told me the best path for me was full disclosure.

When I went to work for Utne Reader in 2002, for example, I disclosed my condition—because not disclosing it would have placed an undue burden on the small publishing company. We worked it out so I’d work 75-percent time, thereby not qualifying for company-paid health insurance. Both parties were satisfied with the arrangement. When I went to work at the University of Minnesota in 2006 I also disclosed my condition. My health condition—and associated costs—wouldn’t make much of a dent in the University’s fiscal situation, but I disclosed in the first interview anyway. Why? To this day I’m still not sure except that something told me it was the right thing to do.

But it was my decision.

Last night, in one of the worst pieces of “journalism” I’ve ever seen, the Wall Street Journal reported that Steve Jobs had a liver transplant about two months ago. The bylined work was totally and completely unsourced. Sources amounted to an unnamed “person familiar with the thinking at Apple,” a corporate governance attorney that has no relationship with Apple or its board, a surgeon in Saint Louis who has never treated Jobs, a Saint Louis transplant specialist who, also, has never treated Jobs, and “people who have seen him” at the Apple campus.

In January, the US Securities and Exchange Commission began reviewing Apple’s disclosures about Jobs’s health. At that time the company announced Jobs would be on medical leave through June and Bloomberg News reported that Jobs was “considering a liver transplant as a result of complications after treatment for cancer.” Jobs underwent surgery for pancreatic cancer in 2004. Apple and Jobs have consistently declined to comment further.

Apple, in notifying its shareholders that Jobs would be on medical leave, met its legal obligations. There is no legal obligation requiring the company or Jobs to disclose anything else. What the Wall Street Journal did is abhorable and inexcusable. The publication and its “journalists” should be ashamed. It will be interesting to see how other corporate news outlets handle this “story.” This is nothing less than a gross privacy invasion; something that should be illegal.

Update: Saturday, 20 June 2009 09:48PM CDT: Lots of grumbling in the blogosphere about this, at bottom, being an Apple maneuver to misdirect the media and manipulate its stock price. I’m not convinced—not even Apple could be that cynical (I hope)—but independent analyst Joe Wilcox has perhaps the most compelling articulation of this viewpoint. Meanwhile, the rest of the corporate mediasphere doesn’t appear to be taking the bait.

Update: Saturday, 20 June 2009 10:11PM CDT: The New York Times and Wired both weigh in with a basic re-writes of the Journal piece a few minutes ago. Again no sourcing at all. Jobs’s wife Laurene Powell “declined to comment,” to the Times stenographer and the US paper of record actually sources—wait for it—rank speculation from a New York endocrinologist. Has the corporate mediasphere all gone simultaneously mad?