Wired drops the ball on reporting MySpace
"Everything we've ever done is about giving people choices," says News Corp. owner Rupert Murdoch, explaining his purchase of MySpace. "Technology is shifting power away from the editors, the publishers, the establishment, the media elite. Now it's the people who are taking control." Oh look, says Wired Magazine, Rupe IS the media elite, how lovely that he's on our side, ha ha, the man's a visionary.
Please. I'm sure Murdoch launched Fox News, the partisan news network with half the researcher-hours per broadcast-hour of any other network, to give people choices. And his ruthless mission to buy out every media outlet across the globe? Purely humanitarian.
Rupe's spin isn't surprising — name one mogul who doesn't claim to be the Second Coming — but Wired's eager puffery is disappointing. MySpace is just another dumping ground for the old media model — garbage made in high-price studios and pumped out to a lowest-common-denominator audience, smeared thickly with ads — with some profiles and booty pics thrown in.
Why lash out against it? Because in a few days, journo student Trent Lapinski will blow the lid off the MySpace story.
