The inside scoop on Fox's fury with Roger Friedman

By now you've surely heard the news that Fox News "gogger" (as in gossip blogger) Roger Friedman was fired for giving a glowing review to the upcoming 20th Century Fox film "X Men Origins: Wolverine."

The only itty-bitty problem? Friedman reviewed a controversial pirated copy of the film that's been floating around on the Web, giving Fox film executives a nasty dose of tsoris over the prospect of millions of Wolverine fans downloading a free copy of a film the studio will soon be spending tens of millions to market when it hits theaters May 1.

I'll miss Friedman, who was always a lively read. When he was bad, he was really bad, invariably raving about every Harvey Weinstein project, but when he was good, he was really good, doing a great job of exposing the inside maneuvering at places like the Hollywood Foreign Press Assn. and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. But to learn the real reason why Friedman got in such hot water with his "Wolverine" review, you have to read Michael Wolff's blog post today, which makes it clear that Friedman's real sin wasn't reviewing the movie so much as making it obvious how easy it was, with just one click of the mouse, for a typical middle-aged male to watch an illegally pirated Hollywood summer movie.

Wolff speaks with authority, since he just published "The Man Who Owns the News: Inside the Secret World of Rupert Murdoch," a bracing look at Murdoch's media empire, bolstered by hours of interviews with the emperor himself. To the point about the ease of piracy, Wolff writes: "Perhaps [Friedman] found pirating from his own company a bit of irresistible troublemaking. Or, perhaps, like virtually everyone else under some ever-rising age, he just found it too easy and obvious not to do. He didn't even have to download -- just clicked and streamed it. That was actually part of his review -- the manic or childlike delight he took in describing how simple it was to watch a pirated movie."

Wolff's other salient point is that Murdoch, not to mention Friedman's boss, Fox News chief Roger Ailes, like so many other media kingpins of a certain age (think Variety's Peter Bart or Harvey Weinstein) still, in 2009, have virtually no firsthand knowledge of the Internet, much less a visceral understanding of the simplicity involved in watching pirated films or music videos. As Wolff puts it: "They think of this as exceptional behavior, while everybody else knows it's trivial stuff. Actually, Murdoch tends to think that almost everything that happens on the Internet involves dubious, if not outrageous, behavior."

Wolff concludes by chortling at the irony that News Corp., which "profits off of everybody else's self-seriousness and high-mindedness," is now, in the face of disruptive technology, "as uptight and pantywaist and pitiable as everybody else." First it was Peter Chernin who was News Corp.'s anti-piracy czar. Now it will be Murdoch himself. Wolff calls that an unfortunate development destined to speed the crumbling of the News Corp. empire, "because only the pirates will survive in this business." 

I'm not quite as pessimistic as Wolff, but seeing what's happened to my own beloved newspaper business, I'm hardly a starry-eyed optimist either. Friedman took the fall for his own starry-eyed approach to piracy, but if media tycoons like Murdoch believe they can hang on to their old business model forever, they will soon be taking a much bigger fall than Friedman did.

Comments

[dave]

Hit the nail on the head right there...

The age of information-on-physical-media is quickly coming to a close. The expense of creating a physical object and imprinting data on that object is thousands of times greater than sending that same data down glass fiber and copper.

For better or worse, traditional media distribution is no longer a sustainable venture. Consumers have taken on a lot of the distribution responsibilities through P2P filesharing and blogging. The RIAA, MPAA, Author's Guild, AP, et al can either adapt to the changing environment, or they can become irrelevant; fighting an "illegal" distributor consisting of the general populace is a losing battle - eventually, the public will get sick of it, and eliminate copyright law as we know it.

[Christian Toto]

Friedman deserved to go. That was the ultimate rookie mistake on so many levels it's hard to keep count.

[J]

Just wondering why Dave put "illegal" in quotes, as if it's not really illegal but only perceived to be so?

I don't necessarily agree with Friedman's firing over the issue, as Fox should probably be hitting themselves for not giving him an early look at that movie or promising him a review screening or something ahead of time, but to suggest that downloading a movie that you didn't pay for, that probably over a hundred people worked on extremely hard, is not illegal is about the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard.

Why do people have this idea that if someone "makes" something, that if creativity is involved, it should be free? They'll pay for sporting events and restaurants but they refuse to pay for movies and music just because someone made it.

Get a life, no one is really that entitled. People put their lives into music and movies, and they should be compensated, and that (unfortunately or not) includes the big company reponsible for marketing. You're not "owed" anything by the creator and you don't have the "right" to take it because of . If you believe that, then you also believe that no one should pay you for the work you do, or have ever done.

But you probably don't, because many filesharers are hypocrites.

[Laurelle]

I just want to say that it was incredibly stupid and insensitive of FOX to destroy a man's career for simply pointing out the obvious and giving a review of something that is accessible to everyone in the world. This should not be considered a ROOKIE mistake. After all, a reporter's(or gogger's) job is to REPORT. DuH.

Of course all of the people who were involved in the making of x-men origins deserve compensation but there's nothing that can be done about the leak at this point.

Anyways, It's the hard core FANS of x-men who are watching it right now, and who without a doubt will watch it again when the movie premieres.