The WSJ is a Murdoch rag and thus I assume it’s dedicated to nothing other than profit and protecting the establishment.
Edit: Allow me to clarify. I’m just sharing how I view Murdoch properties (incl. FOX, WSJ, and MySpace), and implying that this article is not surprising. Still, I upvoted this submission, because we should demand ethical journalism; we should report on the reporters.
There may well be (and it appears quite likely is) a conflict of interest here, but there are less obnoxious ways of pointing that out. Like, say, the OP.
Hmm, Murdoch gave quite a few assurances when he bought the WSJ that they'd maintain independence as a news organization, at least on the news side (the op-ed page was already super-conservative, and basically a separate organization). Would be problematic for their usefulness if that turns out not to be the case.
Murdoch gave identical promises when he took over the Times of London, they lasted all of about 6 months. The Times went from the most respected UK paper to a downmarket broadsheet that toes the Murdoch line without fault in about 3 years.
Occam's razor suggest choosing the simplest reason. Sadly I think it's the one where WSJ was told not to print something bad about MySpace. Knowing the record of all other news corp subsidiaries this would not be at all surprising.
Murdoch really wants to kill the ad biz so everyone is forced to charge for content. This is almost getting hysterical. Somewhere the former WSJ owners are shaking their head.
That is the reason I don't click through to anything at the WSJ anymore.
Although the Financial Times is blowing their oppurtunity to eat WSJ's online market share, everytime you go to their website you are asked to log in/register. Why do I need to register to read an article?
This kind of reporting is extremely, extremely dangerous. I'm all for this kind of rumor-mill stuff, but, when placed on a site that's supposed to exist as a newscenter, the lines can become incorrectly, and dangerously, crossed.
I'm not sure if it's the traffic success of Angelgate or what, but this kind of rumor-mill junction is the type of libel that can drop stock prices and damage the PR of a company - without any real facts. And that's obviously wrong. That we allow million dollar swings to occur because of one man's reputation for fact alone is an absolute joke, and one that shouldn't be stood for. If Arrington wants to run a tech gossip site, run it. But don't run it on a site that's meant for news - and occasionally, opinionative blog posts that clearly define themselves as such. And definitely, don't run it as fact - with a "this is absolute truth" headline - without the substantive evidence to back it up.
It's irresponsible. And irresponsible is a rather tame way to describe it.
Arrington notes at the bottom of the post that this WSJ article was published after the TechCrunch article and "was supposed to be published earlier this week, and wasn’t". He goes on to say (and it certainly seems likely to be the case) that it probably would not have been published at all had he not written this post.
Another explanation is just that the article was going to be delayed for some non-sinister reason. Then WSJ pushed it out the door in response to the TechCrunch article because, had they published it in (say) a week, it would have looked like they wrote the whole article to answer TechCrunch (as opposed to now where is just looks like the released it to answer TechCrunch).
Edit: Allow me to clarify. I’m just sharing how I view Murdoch properties (incl. FOX, WSJ, and MySpace), and implying that this article is not surprising. Still, I upvoted this submission, because we should demand ethical journalism; we should report on the reporters.