The other side of Steve Jobs: how he 'neutered the free press'
Much newsprint has been expended on the much admired Steve Jobs in the past week and countless hours of video footage (if you can expend video footage) but it took a writer in the Los Angeles Times to say the unsayable : Steve Jobs was anathema to the idea of a free press .
"Few felt the cold shoulder and steely elbows of the Apple chief like the media — particularly those who had the temerity to tell the story of Jobs and his company without his express permission," said James Rainey. 

The irony was that the reporters writing this week's glowing elegies would — after deadline and off the record — " tell stories about a company obsessed with secrecy to the point of paranoia.
"They remind us how Apple shut down a youthful fanboy blogger, punished a publisher that dared to print an unauthorised Jobs biography and repeatedly ran afoul of the most basic tenets of a free press," Rainey points out in a scathing column.
 Conventional wisdom would vindicate Jobs' media strategy, says Rainey. His company grew to one of the biggest in the world. " But because Jobs' command and control paradigm worked at Apple doesn't mean he was always right, or that his methods could be duplicated by lesser figures."

 Dan Gillmor, a longtime reporter on the San Jose Mercury News, told Rainey that Apple " had the uncanny ability to get normally skeptical journalists to sit up and beg like a bunch of pet beagles." 

One of the ironies of the age of digital communications , said Gillmor, was that Apple "had taken stances that, in my opinion, were outright hostile to the practice of journalism." 
Rainey describes as troubling the way Jobs and Apple identified perceived enemies "and then targeted them with daunting obstacles and, in some cases, retaliation." He reports a number of controversial cases, including the stushie over the iPhone lost in bar. The article written from the heart does not fail to pay tribute to the genius of Jobs. But it is a bucket of much-needed cold water on the hype of the past week. 

Steve Jobs appreciated many things, says Rainey, big and small. "But a vigorous, unbridled media was not one of them."