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Newscorp Using Media Empire to Attack Business Competitors |
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Fox News (and I use that term loosely) featured a story this morning called Drunk and Out of Control on Facebook.
From the story: “A user group entitled “30 Reasons Girls Should Call It a Night” has posted more than 4,800 photos of blotto gals on the town, over the toilet and in the bar, often with their panties showing and their faces three sheets to the wind.”
Here is how they presented the story:
The “story” then links to a “photo essay” where you can “see the photos”.
Unfortunately for Fox, I took 45 minutes or so to browse through the photos, with the intention of sending messages to the women pictured asking if they had given permission for Fox to use their photos. Amazingly, none of the photos shown in Fox’s “photo essay” can be found in the photo section of the group in question. That’s right, not a single one. Perhaps they found the photos on fellow Newscorp property, and Facebook competitor, Myspace.
If they really think it is such a shame that “thousands of young women have the added humiliation of millions seeing their wasted debauchery on Facebook”, maybe they should have thought about that before exposing them to a much larger audience. Most of the recent comments on the group are like this one: “Haha yeeeeeah. Fox News is getting the word out there. Didn’t know about this group until the article.”
Could it be a coincidence that this story was featured on foxnews.com just one day after a NewsCorp earnings call in which Rupert Murdoch took repeated shots at Facebook.
MySpace is a place for self-expression, where users’ MySpace pages become their home on the Internet. It is where they discover people, content, and culture — where they share information, communicate, and consume. Facebook, on the other hand, tends to be a web utility, similar to a phonebook.
Here is my theory on how it went down.
- NewsCorp realized that Facebook is taking the lead in the battle for top social networking site.
- Fox threw together a sloppy story to portray Facebook as a repository of photos of young drunk women.
- To make the story seem more realistic, Fox attributed photos to a Facebook group which weren’t actually there.
Any other theories out there? Am I missing something here?
I looked on it earlier and i actually saw all of the photos on the facebook group… maybe you should get some glasses
I looked through the group a bit too, couldn’t find em either. If anyone finds the specific pictures Fox cited, throw a link here.
As Jason said, please send the link along. I skimmed through and did not see any of them.
Regardless, that doesn’t change the point here. Newscorp is losing market share and they are using Fox to discredit their main competitor, Facebook. Pretty pathetic if you ask me.
Anyone notice how the new MySpace interface looks a lot like the Facebook one? MySpace is loosing ground to Facebook, unquestionably. The smartest thing Facebook has done is open an API to developers such that users can add any application they want to their profile pages. MySpace is stuck in the proprietary game of bloated catchup.
I did notice that. Strangely, though, I’m only getting that on some of my profiles. I guess they are phasing it in.