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 pages. She reports on Dupri’s Facebook ’status updates,’ and tries to psychoanalyze 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.”

And surely CNN’s round-the-clock profile stalking had nothing to do with that realization.  The whole article is just a big 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 tabloid journalism — and yes, CNN’s extravagance with the story is significant, because they represent one of the most heavily-trafficked news sites on the web. 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 the 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, fair use, and free content — 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 source, 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 woman, who had to close up her social media accounts (which she was using to promote herself and build an audience for her non-prostitute ventures) because of all the hate mail and spam messages CNN’s white, middle-aged demographic started to send her.

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