Though Goldman never discloses it on air, one of his Apple sources is Apple spokesman Steve Dowling, who previously worked with Goldman at CNBC'S Silicon Valley bureau. Does he have other sources within Apple?

He claims to, as the New York Times notes. He went on air last month, in the clip above, to declare Jobs "fine." And in a recent blog post, Goldman dug himself deeper as he stuck to his story:

All along, sources (and yes, there are several) inside Apple have reassured me that Jobs was firmly in charge, executing his responsibilities, and performing his role as C.E.O. One source, who I have known for years, told me recently that Jobs was 'fine,' and that everything was under control. All of it was fine. And I stand by every word of that reporting. Even today.

"Several" sources: Does that mean Goldman spoke to Dowling, his former colleague, and Katie Cotton, Jobs's personal PR guru at Apple, who has a track record of lying about her boss?

Take this earlier blog post from Goldman, when worries first emerged that Jobs, who had undergone surgery to treat pancreatic cancer in 2004, was skipping the annual Macworld Expo event where he usually delivers a keynote address, because his health was failing:

I can tell you that sources inside the company tell me that Jobs' decision was more about politics than his pancreas. Sources tell me that if Jobs for some reason was unable to perform any of his responsibilities as CEO because of health reasons, which would include the Macworld keynote, I should 'rest assured that the board would let me know.'

Sounds like Goldman has a direct line to the Apple board, right? Wrong. That's the same statement Dowling gave every other media outlet:

If Steve or the board decides that Steve is no longer capable of doing his job as CEO of Apple, I am sure they will let you know.

The only conclusion to reach here: Either Goldman is puffing up flacks as sources, or his sources don't exist.

That's what one former colleague of Goldman's thinks:

Here’s the key to revealing Goldman — he doesn’t have any sources. And his bosses back in New Jersey don’t know that. His only Apple "source" is a flack, Steve Dowling, who once worked at CNBC as the Silicon Valley (off-air) bureau chief.

The question you should raise — does CNBC's managing editor know who Goldman’s sources are? He inflates his bogus persona as a Silicon Valley insider by inventing sources. At any legitimate news organization, if you can use an unnamed "source" your boss must know who it is, by name.

Does CNBC follow this practice? (The answer, as I know well, is: no).

I’ve watched Goldman sit at his desk without picking up the phone for hours, then go on the air and say “I just got off the phone with a source inside Google who tells me...”

He flat out makes it up. He IS Jayson Blair. And he's the only person at CNBC who even tries to get away with it.

Fast Company's Adam Penenberg tried Googling "CNBC ethics" and came up short. We called Kevin Goldman, a spokesman for CNBC, to ask what the network's policies on anonymous sources were — how they were to be used, and whether reporters were obligated to reveal their identities to their editors and producers. (Such is the practice at most magazines and newspapers.)

Goldman (no relation to Jim) said, "CNBC has policies and guidelines that are followed by everyone. And we don't disclose those policies to the public." And he would not comment on the identity of CNBC's sources at Apple.

Blogs are not known for impeccable sourcing. (We call them "tipsters" for a reason.) But at least we're upfront about it — indeed, we're the first to question our sources, often in the same blog post that we cite them. That kind of probing uncertainty makes for a better path to the truth. But it doesn't make good television, and it doesn't fluff up the easily deflated ego of a self-declared "insider."

In a letter posted to Apple's website, Jobs writes:

As many of you know, I have been losing weight throughout 2008. The reason has been a mystery to me and my doctors. A few weeks ago, I decided that getting to the root cause of this and reversing it needed to become my #1 priority.

Fortunately, after further testing, my doctors think they have found the cause—a hormone imbalance that has been “robbing” me of the proteins my body needs to be healthy. Sophisticated blood tests have confirmed this diagnosis.

The remedy for this nutritional problem is relatively simple and straightforward, and I’ve already begun treatment. But, just like I didn’t lose this much weight and body mass in a week or a month, my doctors expect it will take me until late this Spring to regain it. I will continue as Apple’s CEO during my recovery.

The letter is an obvious response to the furor unleashed by a post on the gadget blog Gizmodo, in which a source privy to Apple's product secrets claimed Jobs's health was "rapidly declining." The source was right about the "declining" part, wrong about the "rapidly," it turns out.

It has been an expensive secret to keep. Apple's market value has jumped by $2.3 billion this morning alone, as traders reveled in the relief of a lie undone.

In the fall of 2003, Jobs was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, a fact he kept secret until July 2004, when he underwent surgery to remove the cancer and rewire his digestive system.

This summer, when Jobs's gauntness grew unmistakable, people wondered if Jobs's cancer had returned. But a simple look at a decade worth of photos of Jobs, who is famed for his annual keynote speech at January's Macworld Expo, showed that his weight loss was progressive, not the sign of some sudden illness.

Stupidly, that was the story Apple spokespeople stuck to — that he had a "common bug." The denial of a deeper health problem just fueled more speculation — and led Jobs, in a profane call to a New York Times writer, to explain, off the record, the same mysterious health problem he's now told the world about.

Jobs's terse explanation, though, raises more question than it answers. Now that he's given everyone a tidbit, they'll want more. Which hormones? What's the cure? Why did Jobs take so long to say he had a health problem? Why did Apple PR lie and say everything was fine? And why did gullibly servile reporters like CNBC's Jim Goldman buy it, counting a call to an Apple spokesman as "reporting"?

Which brings me back to the stock market's reaction: Investors are, perversely, happier knowing Jobs is unwell. Which means it's time for him to go. He has done incredible things for Apple in the past decade, rescuing a company that the industry viewed as certainly moribund.

But the lack of clarity about his future has become an albatross for the company. The stock market hates risk. So the possibility that Apple might lose Jobs's services through death and illness gets discounted; as far as investors are concerned, Jobs is already dead to them.

Which is the real reason why we're seeing Apple marketing executive Phil Schiller, Jobs's jokey demo sidekick, give Jobs's keynote speech tomorrow. Jobs may be better by the spring. But it's time for his company to act like he's gone.

Wall Street analysts estimate that Jobs, regarded as a perfectionist product visionary who has resuscitated Apple's business, adds some $20 billion to Apple's market capitalization. Apple's stock price, down 5 percent in after-hours trading, is expressing fears that genteel reporters can't: Could an ever-worsening illness have led Jobs to cancel his annual Macworld keynote?

Jobs underwent major surgery in 2004 to treat pancreatic cancer. Since then, he's believed to have suffered complications which led to his gaunt appearance — an illness Apple's top flack, Katie Cotton, brazenly lied about.

Apple's official story: Trade shows are a boring, outdated form of marketing, and Apple has better ways to reach consumers. But Jobs made Macworld anything but boring through his theatrical unveilings. They caused such a frenzy that bloggers made an art of reporting on his every word in real time.

I don't expect Apple to comment on Jobs's health. He has made it clear he thinks it's nobody's business, calling New York Times columnist Joe Nocera a "slime bucket" for daring to ask. The stock market is giving voice to an impolitic concern: What will Apple look like without Steve Jobs?

The story got big because hordes of tech reporters, including Goldman himself, noticed Jobs's sickly appearance at the iPhone 3G launch. Katie Cotton, who as best we can tell is Jobs's personal flack on Apple's payroll, tried to deal with them by telling them Jobs simply had a "common bug." It was an obvious lie and it only added mystery to an already juicy story Apple shareholders had every right to understand. If Jobs is looking to blame someone other than himself, Cotton makes a convenient target for his famous wrath.

Apple's secretive ways have paid off for it in turning every product release into a marketing event. But by applying that same Kremlin-like opaqueness to its corporate affairs, Apple has gone astray. "By claiming Mr. Jobs had a bug, Apple wasn’t just going dark on its shareholders," Nocera writes. "It was deceiving them."

It's one thing for Jobs to lie about Apple's unreleased gadgets — for example, when he publicly dismissed the notion of producing an iPod that played video in 2004, even as Apple was secretly working on one. That kind of maneuver can be put down to competitive misdirection. But to extend it to the health of a public company's CEO? Unseemly.

As unseemly, really, as the Apple apologists among us who join Apple PR in repeating the mantra that Jobs's health is a "private matter". Wishing doesn't make it so. With Jobs personally accounting for a quarter of Apple's market cap, it's everyone's concern.

Apple's fans have a choice: They can join Jobs himself in insulting award-winning reporters like Nocera, and dismissing the whole affair. Or they can face reality: Steve Jobs let his personal flack lie for him — and they bought it. That must really bug them.

Cotton's title is vice president of worldwide corporate communications at Apple. But her real job is serving as Apple CEO Steve Jobs's personal flack. Always at Jobs's side, Cotton puts Jobs's interests ahead of Apple's — sometimes quite literally, like when she took time away from Apple to handle PR for Disney's acquisition of Pixar, where Jobs was CEO but where Cotton did not work. The Pixar deal may have been good for Jobs personally — he is now one of Disney's largest shareholders, and a board member there — but it's not clear how the interests of Apple shareholders were served by Cotton's extracurricular efforts.

After Jobs's gaunt appearance at the announcement of the iPhone 3G in June sparked questions about his health — including speculation that his cancer might have returned — Cotton had an opportunity to lay out the facts: Jobs's pancreatic surgery in 2004, while successful, was not without complications. Removing part of the pancreas requires a rewiring of the digestive tract. Weight loss is a common side effect, as food rushes undigested through the body. That matter can create blockages, which in turn can lead to infections.

That seems like the most likely explanation for what happened to Jobs before Apple's World Wide Developers Conference: He suffered a blockage which lead to an infection, requiring treatment.

Instead, Cotton told reporters that Jobs had a "common bug" and had been taking antibiotics. Not exactly a lie, but far from the complete truth — her phrasing was obviously meant to suggest Jobs had some kind of cold. In fact, he had to have a surgical procedure to address the problem, the New York Times recently reported. Hardly a "common bug."

Cotton is obviously serving her boss's obsessive need for privacy. But in an age when we ask presidential candidates for their medical records, is it too much to expect a company like Apple to provide basic, accurate information about its CEO's health — especially when billions of dollars of Apple's market value are attributed to Jobs himself?

Cotton should remember this: She doesn't actually work for Steve Jobs. She works for Apple's shareholders. If it's too late for her to start doing her job accordingly, then it's time for her to go.

(Photo by Violet Blue))

Pogue attempts to pack the supposed evenhandedness of a gadget review into his song-and-dance routine, with tiresome results. And in the end, all you remember is the disgraceful spectacle of a Timesman bawling at the top of his lungs, "I want an iPhone!" Gee, David, we thought a call to Apple PR chief Katie Cotton would have scratched that itch a long time ago.

"Dontcha," by contrast, captures the most essential point about the iPhone: It turns its owners into monsters, imbuing them with a false sense of their own importance and sex appeal. The spectacle of geeks attempting to rap and perform dance hip-hop moves perfectly captures the inflated sense of self the iPhone lends. The video, directed by recent L.A. transplant Nora McDevitt, has a cast of microstars: Randi Jayne, the force behind "Valleyfreude" and sister of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg; David Prager, COO of online-video startup Revision3; and Irina Slutsky of Geek Entertainment TV. (Jayne, Prager, and Slutsky also produced the video.) Jayne, in particular, shines, getting the Britney Spears wind-machine treatment as she disses the Sidekick, the Razr, and other cell phones that just aren't as hot. It almost — almost — made me want to buy one, something the endless Apple hype parade has yet to achieve.