Mark Casey Online

I don’t know who CNN thinks they are. Maybe they read my post yesterday about how wrong it was for them to parade around uncredited content and pictures from Ashley Alexandra Dupri’s MySpace page, but for whatever reason, their lead story this morning is nothing but more “quotes” and content lifted directly from Dupri’s MySpace and Facebook accounts. (For the record, Dupri is the high-priced escort at the center of New York Governor Eliot Spitzer’s prostitution scandal.)

With a sickeningly obvious tone of glee, CNN’s Mallory Simon wrote an “article” which is, literally, a detailed play-by-play of the events on Dupri’s MySpace and Facebook. She reports on Dupri’s Facebook ’status updates,’ and tries to infer what was going on in Durpi’s head when she wrote them, for example:

“Early Thursday morning, it appears Dupre realized she needed to make some changes to alter what the public would be able to know about her.”

It’s just a list of things like that. “Early Thursday morning,” “At 3:00pm,” and finally: “By 2:30pm, her MySpace and Facebook pages were gone.”

Yes, that’s right. Dupri was chased off the internet by CNN’s newfound tabloid journalism. And Mallory Simon just sat there and watched her updates roll by, taking notes and sketching out ways to somehow make Dupri’s friend requests a legitimate story.

CNN does go out of its way to quote one actual person, though. It’s a Law Professor (oh, god) from American University (Jesus Christ). And he’s happy to inform CNN and you, the reader, that Dupri has no right to privacy and deserves no respect from the media. After all, she opened up a MySpace account — why would she ever expect that information not to be exploited for free by mainstream media outlets?

That same law professor has some snarky comments about Dupri’s interest in singing, and her frustration that people were flooding her with hate mail:

“Unfortunately, you can’t say, ‘Oh well, I didn’t want that kind of publicity, I only wanted positive publicity,’”

I wonder what kind of publicity Mr. Professor wants.

Simon even goes so far as to detail how much she loves to investigate her subjects on the internet:

“Facebook and MySpace have become one of the go-to background tools for journalists in the past couple of years, allowing members of the press to put a face to the subject of their story and find out more about them.”

Look, I’m all for open source media — I think we should all visit social networks and interact with one another. And I’m well aware that CNN is within its rights to exploit this sort of information. It’s hypocrisy I’m against. It’s the fact that CNN would probably send me a cease and desist letter if they saw their logo on my blog. And exploitation, no matter what the purpose, is unethical. CNN can be my guest to write any number of stories that cite MySpace and Facebook pages — as long as they’re part of actual stories.

These last two were not actual stories. They were barely Tabloid stories. I hope CNN gives some of their ad revenue from this week to that poor girl, who had to close up her social media accounts because of all the hate mail CNN’s white, middle-aged demographic started to send her.

The mainstream media is giving us a schooling today on how to completely exploit a young woman — and the free content she’s created on her MySpace page — for fun and profit.

The 22-year old high-priced escort at the center of the Eliot Spitzer prostitution scandal wants to be called Ashley Alexandra Dupre. That’s her pop star name. Her escort name was Kristen, who was described in court papers as a “Petite, very pretty brunette.”

Immediately after her “real” name was released by the courts, mainstream media mainstays like the New York Times, CNN, and of course FoxNews — who so often laugh off sites like MySpace as ‘illegitimate media,’ — were using her MySpace page to earn themselves millions. The Times was first on the case, publishing three photos of her culled free of charge from her MySpace page. CNN did them one better, quoting from her blog posts as if they had actually interviewed her.

CNN’s headline read:

“Spitzer’s Escort: ‘I love who I am’”

Then their whole front page article ripped quotes out of her blogs, and used her “About Me” section to psychoanalyze the young girl. They doctored a quote from her that originally read “It all started when I moved in with a musician during my Odyssey to New York.”

CNN thought it would be better if they said she was on “an ‘Odyssey’ of degrading abuse and high aspirations.” They are, of course, talking about her admitted “drug abuse” and the fact that she left home when she was 17. But things seem to be going very well for her — she makes a very good living doing something that she seems to enjoy, and she has time to work on her ultimate goal of being a singer.

And for what it’s worth, her songs aren’t that bad. They’re the standard kind of pop/hip-hop songs you hear all over the radio, but her voice is decent.

All the articles contain at least a trace of tut-tutting about this poor girl’s “degradation” and exploitative lifestyle. But none of them seem to conceptualize their own exploitation of the MySpace service and the personal nature that users see their content as being. It’s certainly public information — and, according to contract, “owned” by MySpace.com — but that doesn’t change how creepy it is that the media would raid her page for some tabloid-style gossip.

I’m sure her page is flooded now that CNN has “interviewed” it and left it for dead. She’s getting all kinds of comments, mostly positive, such as “All this pressure is going to turn you into a diamond.” Who says she isn’t already?

Support her via MySpace here: http://www.myspace.com/ninavenetta

More photos below.

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