the world about what was happening. In addition to honor and ego and all
of the other things that [come into play] when you kind of screw up.”
—
SOON I DISCOVERED THAT Samsung had taken offense at what I was
saying about it and had launched a defensive attack on me personally.
After offering my candid take to CNN and NPR and other media about the
Note 7, I opened my email in-box to a message that had been forwarded to
me written by David Steel, an old dinner friend who served as Samsung’s
executive vice president and chief of global communications. A genteel
and well-spoken Englishman who had a PhD in physics from MIT, he was
complaining about what I’d been quoted as saying on NPR. I had repeated
on prime-time news what Samsung’s employees were telling me.
“These one-sided, sensational views,” Steel wrote about my
commentary, “do not fit with NPR’s reputation for fairness and balance.”
He called me one of two “self-declared Samsung critics” and decried my
commentary as “particularly inappropriate.”
I was becoming persona non grata over the Note 7 fiasco. It’s a risk
confronted by any journalist who goes against the official line of the
company they cover. But I knew this was the only way to write honestly
about the company.
—
ON THE MORNING OF October 11, 2016, a day after Samsung halted
production of the Note 7, I opened my smartphone to a message from a
Samsung marketing manager.
“Can you please check what’s going on with our Apple iPhones?” she
wrote. “It seems like they have various defects and the media keeps
silent.” She was looking to shift the heat to a competitor.
I realized that Samsung wasn’t ready to admit to failure. For years I’d
heard in-house conspiracy theories from friends and contacts at the
company that Samsung saw itself as misunderstood and mistreated—that
the press and the shareholders were out to get it. When a young business
journalist dropped into Seoul to write about the Note 7 fires, a public
relations executive told her the negative media reports on his company
came from the fact that “everyone loves a good Apple story.”