This seem like an important charge from Jason O’Grady.

Apple’s public relations department is notoriously tight-lipped and only responds to a limited subset of the mainstream media, and usually only the outlets that write positive things about its products.

If you dare to write an unflattering piece about Apple or — heaven forbid – post a rumor you’re almost guaranteed to lose your access to Apple. I know this firsthand because I’m the poster child of Apple’s PR blacklist.

(O’Grady ran PowerPage which was subject to a lawsuit by Apple in 2004 over information published about a product Apple was working on in secret.)

The article then goes on to the case surround Path, and how it accessed the iPhone’s contact data which, while against Apple’s written rule, appeared to be secretly tolerated by Apple. Reaction to this by the tech press was interesting, and not because of the spectacle of MG Siegler’s breakdown. Discussions about Apple's role was very muted. Admittedly, the past two weeks I’ve been somewhat preoccupied and I was not following the tech press as deeply as I do typically, but I did not recall seeing much discussion about what was the apparent failure of the app-review process. Well, not until MG Siegler in a last ditch attempt to defend Path came out to claim that everybody else does it too. I’d expected that charge to have lead to some pointed questions to Apple, but instead we got some muted defenses (though criticisms here and there were levied).

But yeah, it does feel like good cheer is required to retain good relations on this beat. On that front, the left coast is not at all different from the right coast.

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Well, I noticed something similar. In this post (http://daringfireball.net/linked/2011/03/29/honeycomb-app-count), Gruber links to an article by Justin Williams that claimed very very few apps for Honeycomb. There are many issues with that article, but the most important one is that there were in fact hundreds of apps designed for the tablet form factor in the Android market, at the time when the article was written.
So I shot up an email to Justin Williams, since he added a "contact me" link (specifically for making corrections to the list), and I thought he made an honest mistake. I listed a bunch of apps, and told him how to search (I think either "Honeycomb" or "tablet" did the trick) in order to find more. He added those that I mentioned, but no more. So I sent a second email, giving some more apps, to make a total of 21 ( Gruber's snark pissed me off, I wanted to at least make his comment technically incorrect). Justin refused one (apparently it didn't meet his criteria of being "tablet-specific" enough). So I shot up a third mail- "ok, one more humor me, I want the list to be longer than 20 items" (and I gave him at least one more app that would clearly pass his criteria - in fact I think I gave him more, just to be sure).
I didn't say why I want the list to have more than 20 items, but he probably guessed. I never heard from him again, and he didn't modify the list (in fact his list includes now 21 apps if you count them, so at a later time he did add one more link; but if you just read the article, and don't count the links, it still says "Based on my criteria, I found 20 apps").
Bear in mind, Gruber is not Apple. But even so, in the Appleverse, it seems that the people are afraid to upset the influencers. I guess Justin feared that Gruber would no longer send traffic his way? I can only speculate what happened, but it doesn't look good at all. So yeah, I totally believe Jason O'Grady.