Did Anne Kornblut of the Washington Post overhype White House technical problems?

Yesterday, Anne Kornblut of the Washington Post offered "Staff Finds White House in the Technological Dark Ages" (link), a story presumably designed to appeal to tech-savvy Obama supporters:

If the Obama campaign represented a sleek, new iPhone kind of future, the first day of the Obama administration looked more like the rotary-dial past... "It is kind of like going from an Xbox to an Atari," Obama spokesman Bill Burton said of his new digs... The [new-media] team members, accustomed to working on Macintoshes, found computers outfitted with six-year-old versions of Microsoft software.

Now, today, Fox News offers "White House Already Well Wired, Bush Staffers Say" (link):

Former Bush administration staffers disputed the tone of a Washington Post story published Thursday that described a tech-savvy Obama team moving into a building equipped with creaky computers, out-of-date software, no e-mail service and dead phone lines... Rather, the former staffers said, the White House has everything a modern corporate office would — Windows XP, BlackBerrys, Outlook e-mail, plenty of laptops and lots of flatscreen monitors and TVs.

It's a difficult choice about who to believe. Fox News has been pro-Bush, and this site hasn't been pro-Bush. On the other hand, the WaPo might as well as have been working for the Obama campaign, and Anne Kornblut is a complete hack. Decisions! I think I'll go with Fox in this case.

Fri, 01/23/2009 - 11:29 · · Importance: 4