MIT's Tech Review Pulls A Jayson Blair

from the whooops dept

nonuser writes "MIT's Technology Review retracted two stories on reaction by HP rank and file employees to the firing of CEO Carly Fiorina, both written by a New York freelance journalist named Michelle Delio. The stories referred to a Hungarian immigrant, identified only by the initials G.S., who worked at HP's Imaging System Laboratory for nearly three decades before resigning in disgust in 2003. G.S. compared Fiorina's leadership with that of the Communist regime he had fled. The only problem was the employee apparently didn't exist, as HP officials pointed out to the embarrassed Tech Review editor." Delio (who also used to write articles for Wired News) apparently still insists that the guy is real -- but no one else can find any evidence of him. It's also not clear if this is a case where Delio made the guy up, or someone tricked Delio into believing he was real. The original Tech Review article was a bit strange. When reading it, it seemed that the guy put in enough information about himself that it would be quite easy to figure out who he was if you worked at HP Labs. Still, what may be most interesting is that HP actually did an internal investigation to figure out who the guy was.

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