Todd Cochrane of Geek News Central seem to be pretty upset about a little incident that happened at CES last week. When I saw the title of his blog post "Gizmodo should be banned from all media events" I figured he just complaining again, like a lot of us bloggers do. I read his post and I kindof agree with his thoughts on this. I don’t know if Gizmodo should be banned but something should be done.

If you haven’t heard about what happened yet, heres the skinny. Some of the Gizmodo guys were given a device called TV-B-Gone. This device will power off almost any TV in the area with a press of a button, without having to program it or anything. At CES the guys were having a little fun turning off TVs at some of the booths. Yea I think it is a little childish but it they were just having a little fun. If it stopped there, I think it wouldn’t have been a big deal. But it didn’t stop there

Soon, Gizmodo were turning off TVs during press events and presentations, completely screwing up companies presentation. Todd’s complaint was that bloggers and other people covering the show are all there working hard to get information while you have a big name like Gizmodo, who basically don’t have to put much effort in getting invitations to things, playing around and messing up presentations by turning off TVs.

One presentation in particular was held by Motorola where a guy was on a stage with 2 monitors displaying products he was trying to give information about. As he points to the monitor to talk about the product, it goes black. People from Motorola are frantically trying to figure out what is wrong while the guy speaking is still trying to hold the presentation.

Gizmodo, did somewhat apologize on their website, but it didn’t seem too sincere. I don’t know if they should get banned, but what do you do in this situation?

 

Update: Word is that CEA has banned the Gizmodo staff member that was pulling the prank from any further CES event, and they are still in talks with Gawker media about any other actions (Gawker is the parent company for Gizmodo)