My Space and Risque Business

With online portal My Space all over the news in the last few days, the editors at XBiz World magazine have wisely decided to lift the normal 30-day embrago from print-to-web and are now running part one of my investigative feature online:

Writer and satirist Dave Barry once accused TV journalists of having the intellectual depth of hamsters. Many would argue that the same sentiment can be applied to loyal viewers of media titan Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News Channel, a right-leaning, flag-waving, jingoistic propaganda machine thinly disguised as broadcast journalism.

In July, Fox Interactive Media (FIM), a wholly owned subsidiary of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., agreed to acquire Intermix Media Inc., which owns more than 30 e-commerce and media websites, for $580 million in cash, extending News Corp.’s online reach to an additional 30 million unique monthly users.

And the jewel in the Intermix Media crown, the reason for that hefty price tag? MySpace.com, a social networking site that has more page views per month than Google and eBay and whose audience consists largely of sex-obsessed 14- to 32-year-olds — the perfect target demographic for Murdoch’s controversial form of mixed media. And did we mention that MySpace is filled to its electronic rafters with porn stars?

You can read part one of the story here. Part two will run shortly.