'Off-the-Record' Is Not Confirmation

A warning to Apple (AAPL Quote) investors: A scoop that wasn't, about an off-the-record interview that wasn't, should not offer the assurances you need and deserve about the health of Steve Jobs. Hopefully, those assurances will play out -- for the good of Jobs, his family, U.S. business and Apple shareholders.

Just don't think you got an assurance when you didn't.

The strange turn in the peculiar health saga of the Apple CEO came Saturday, in a Joe Nocera column in The New York Times. Here's the background: though the medical history and open questions concerning public disclosure are close to common knowledge, Jobs disclosed the fact that he had pancreatic cancer four years ago, a condition discovered a year earlier.

His form of cancer appeared to be treatable and it seemed a non-issue until Jobs' appearance at the Worldwide Developers Conference several weeks back. When the media reported on Jobs' obvious weight loss, Apple dismissed any concern, saying he had a "common bug" but other than that his health was a "private matter." Considering the history of obfuscation and the fact that Jobs is CEO of a public company with no parallel of heir apparent, not all believed or agreed.

Before the publication of Nocera's column, last week brought one other high-profile article that quoted sources close to Jobs as saying he actually had a surgical procedure to correct a digestion problem (so much for that common bug, rarely known to give sufferers a near emaciated look anyway).