Since when does two-week-old cocktail party speculation by Tony Perkins, founder of the entirely irrelevant AlwaysOn tech news hub, count as news? At DFJ's recent party, Perkins, after a few drinks, presumably, gave d7tv.com's blonde-wigged Party Crashers reporter the inside dope on the turmoil at Fox Interactive. Ross Levinsohn, Perkins heard, was fired from the News Corporation unit after it was discovered he was raising an independent investment fund. Exciting, except Tony Perkins isn't as plugged-in as he was when he published Red Herring. And that so isn't what happened at Fox Interactive.

The uglier truth: Ross Levinsohn's one great achievement at Fox Interactive was the acquisition of MySpace and he had fallen out with Tom Anderson and Chris DeWolfe, founders of the fabulously popular social network. It was a classic me-or-him choice for Rupert Murdoch and News Corporation management. Both Mark and Ross just couldn't handle the insanity of the MySpace guys, demanded more control, didn't get it, and left.

As for Levinsohn's fund, News Corporation knew about it, and even offered to invest in order to save face all round. Levinsohn wanted more time to prepare an elegant exit, but News Corp patience ran out, and they dismissed him.

Moral of the story:

• it's always messier than it looks;
• Tony Perkins only knows what he reads in the blogs;
• the machinations of media conglomerates are a mystery, even to many of their own executives;
• there are good rumors, and bad rumors;
• and even if a rumor makes its way across the media barrier, onto teevee, and swirls back into normally sensible blogs such as Venture Beat, two weeks later; doesn't mean it's true.

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