I have seen the original email that Robert sent. As published by Orlowski text has been added in that wasn’t in the original email per Scoble. The only other explanation is that someone else doctored the email prior to giving it to Orlowski.

Now I’m willing to consider this but Orlowski has been somewhat silent on this since he published it. I also wrote his editor and have not heard back from anyone at the Register.

If Orlowski didn’t make up the email fine, but provide us a source where he got it then and let’s hear their side of the story.

When CBS was duped by forged documents they had the good sense to out the “anonymous” contributor of the emails.

Instead all we get from the Register and Orlowski is silence.

While I can appreciate your support for Orlowski I don’t think his silence on this subject adds any credibility to his story.

As for Robert’s “thousands of fact checkers”, not a single one of those fact checkers has seen the evidence, either from Robert or Andrew. Fact checkers can’t check when they can’t see the facts Yet lots of people are simply weighing on on Robert’s side, because he’s Robert – not because they know Andrew’s lying.

Robert’s got a book deal, one of the top blogs on the internet, etc. etc. He could work for any company or even himself at this point.

The critical thing to all of this for Scoble though is integrity. It’s the foundation of how he has built this personal franchise. People read Scoble because it is refreshing to see someone who is personally honest working and blogging from within corporate America. That’s the whole hook to Scoble’s success, he’s honest. If Scoble were ever caught in a lie (and he has millions of fact checkers) all of this would crumble.

I will guarantee you that the financial value of Scoble’s personal reputation is greater than Orlowski’s value as a journalist.

So if this is your argument (who stands more to lose) you’ve got it wrong. It’s a stupid argument though and I suspect at some point the truth will come out and I’d be will to bet that Robert will be vindicated and Orlowski will be fired and hopefully never work in the journalism business again.

Whether he likes it or not, Robert blogs as a representative of Microsoft, and he will defend Microsoft’s reputation in public. When a story also ends up attacking *his* reputation (something that I don’t agree with) he has a double reason to not be entirely truthful.

Personally I think this entire thing has gotten way out of hand, with Robert reacting badly and Andrew turning a simple story into a personal attack.

So he basically has no way to establish the authenticity of the email, he obviously made no effort to verify the authenticity, and he’s clearly pissed about Robert for one reason or another. What fun.

I wonder if the original recipient would be brave enough to share the headers and the ID assigned to the message by the originating Microsoft.com email server.