I am genuinely baffled by the journalistic ethics debate over TechCrunch's decision to publish Twitter corporate documents that were apparently obtained through "hacking" and then forwarded to the Silicon Valley business blog.

TechCrunch appears to have played no role whatsoever in the alleged hacking. According to TechCrunch, it was simply sent 310 documents, unsolicited. It then decided to print "financial projections, product plans and notes from executive strategy meetings," as well as "the original pitch document for the Twitter TV show that hit the news in May." Why? "[M]ostly because it's awesome." TechCrunch voluntarily refrained from publishing other information contained in the documents, including "floorplans and security passcodes to get into the Twitter offices." According to the NY Times, TechCrunch's founder Michael Arrington (a fellow OMM alum) "is working closely with Twitter as it determines which pieces of information to publish," though "[h]e is protecting the identity of his source."

Here's what I don't get: why the ethical hand-wringing here? Why was TechCrunch's decision to publish some of the hacked documents any different from what mainstream publications like the Times and Wall Street Journal do countless times every day: print information and documents leaked from employees to reporters, without company permission? Every company I've ever heard of prefers to keep its business information confidential. Often, they have formal confidentiality policies, or even require employees (and contractors) to enter into strict nondisclosure agreements. Of course business reporters know this. And yet, without giving it a second thought, they ask employees to violate their duties to their employers, and leak confidential documents and spill the beans on company secrets. And their editors don't wring their hands; they praise their reporters for their scoops.

In some ways, what typical reporters do in soliciting confidential documents is ethically worse than what TechCrunch did. Reporters typically ask sources to give them confidential documents knowing full well that the employee is breaking company policy, and possibly civil or even criminal laws (e.g., conversion or theft of trade secrets). But TechCrunch did no such thing; by its account, the hacked documents just showed up unsolicited in its inbox. And assuming that's accurate, I think TechCrunch faces no significant legal risk from publishing the material. See Bartnicki v. Vopper, 532 U.S. 514 (2001) (radio host not liable under wiretapping statutes for broadcasting illegally intercepted conversations, where he played no role in illegal interception).

The hand-wringers can't have it both ways. Either TechCrunch's decision to print was perfectly legitimate journalism — or what business reporters do every single day is even more unethical. Am I missing some distinction?

Media conglomerates such as Time Warner, which went through its own disastrous mega-merger with AOL in 2000, seemed finally to be recognizing that size wasn't everything. “Whether [Time Warner] is the biggest is not the main thing," said Jeffrey Bewkes, Time Warner's incoming chief executive. "It needs to be the most profitable." Sumner Redstone last year spun out Viacom's traditional media businesses such as TV network, CBS. And Barry Diller's IAC is, even if only after pressure from disgruntled shareholders, being broken up.

Now one can be sure every media company chief executive is running around like a headless chicken. They know that their future depends on internet advertising. For the moment, the bulk of the growth appears to be going to those properties with the biggest audience reach, which scares smaller media companies. Add in a mega-merger they don't understand: it's the perfect environment for media bankers to present consolidation as inevitable and their hair-brained schemes as urgent.

Most of these ideas will come to nothing. But someone who understands the web just enough to be dangerous, will be panicked into a moronic deal. (Arthur Sulzberger of the New York Times, maybe, though he's hampered by the family legacy). Microsoft will survive the hugely expensive and wearying combination it is now proposing. Traditional media companies which follow its example don't have the luxury of making the same mistakes.

• Ask. Diller said he planned to spend $100m developing and promoting IAC's flagship search engine. After an impenetrable advertising campaign, touting Ask's New Jersey algorithm, what's the impact on the search engine's market share? Nothing measurable. The chief executive, a Diller favorite, is out.
• Vimeo. Josh Abramson and Ricky Van Veen's College Humor remains popular among college students and those whose humor remains frozen in sophomore year. But IAC's bigger interest was the online video site, a precursor to Youtube, which the College Humor techies set up in the spare time. Vimeo creator and Julia Allison cheater, Jakob Lodwick, was fired late last year. Vimeo's traffic is hardly measurable beside Youtube.
• VSL (a highbrow email newsletter of cultural recommendations dreamed up by Kurt Andersen and Diller's content guru, Michael Jackson) is close to Diller's heart. "Without Very Short List, I would be much diminished," said Diller. Unfortunately, the internet as a whole would not be. Last time I checked, the subscription list was only some 20,000 people. (I'm told the base has grown several hundred percent since then.) Culturally-literate email-reading billionaires are in short supply.
• 23/6, IAC's stab at political humor with the help of the Huffington Post, is stillborn. Michael Jackson's other joint venture, a business site done in collaboration with Dow Jones, may never even get off the ground. Says one insider: "It's obvious it won't work somewhat from the outside but the inside scoop is zero progression/movement. As Sanchez (IAC's foul-mouthed head of corporate communications) might have said, just a lot of wanking."
• Lending Tree will be spun off for less than half the price Diller paid for it. This is not the best moment in the cycle to sell a mortgage broker. And the mogul did himself no favors by alienating Rich Barton, an IAC board member, who left aggrieved after Diller spun out Expedia, his online travel agent. Barton founded a competitor, Zillow.

IAC holds some prospering and substantial businesses such as Ticketmaster, the online ticketing site, and Match, the online dating exchange. But even these have been forced uncomfortably to walk in lockstep with IAC's other businesses, even when the logic has been flimsy. The unvarnished truth is that Diller, who built up Fox into the fourth television network for Rupert Murdoch, has a dismal track record in running internet businesses. No amount of Diller's brutal charm can obscure that.

What the mogul does have is the contrarian courage of a great investor, and a mastery of the dark arts of corporate infighting. He acquired e-commerce assets during the downturn, when other investors had written off the internet as a blip. And he's playing hardball with as much skill and ruthlessness as his disgruntled shareholder, John 'Darth Vader' Malone.

That raises the question. Why does Diller, a 65-year-old who enjoys his yacht and parties he throws with his hostess, fashion designer Diane Von Furstenberg, even pretend to run these businesses? He should not be the plucky entrepreneur fighting off the evil corporate raider. Diller is on the wrong side of that eternal conflict. He has certain skills and the temperament, just none suited to a managerial role. The detached and machinating capitalist played in the current struggle by John Malone? That should be, in the next business life at least, Diller himself.

The Journal, officially, says only that there was a contretemps between Pui-Wing Tam, the Journal reporter working on a color piece on mogul real estate, and a construction crew working on his property. A spokesman for Dow Jones, parent company of the Wall Street Journal, said Pui-Wing was never charged. And Benioff isn't saying anything. But, the accounts of several Journal reporters describe a paranoid tech mogul, a massive over-reaction to an innocent article, and still chilly relations between the Journal and the Salesforce.com CEO.

Benioff's campaign against Pui-Wing began well before the article appeared in May this year. He wrote letters to Dow Jones management, including Karen House, the wife of the outgoing Dow Jones CEO. Benioff hired a crisis PR agency. He flew to New York to berate Paul Steiger, the Journal's managing editor. And the irony is that it was because of his complaints that the Journal felt obliged to get a first-hand account of the property, sending Pui-Wing to Hawaii, so that they could not be accused of reliance on second-hand information. Benioff brought the visit upon himself.

In Hawaii, Pui-Wing was first taken to a neighboring property by a real estate agent. Later, she returned alone, in order to take more photos. Inadvertently, according to her colleagues, she was on a stretch of road that was on Benioff's land. His construction crew, apparently alerted by Benioff to a possible intruder, detained her. They spoke with Benioff, and then the police.

The detention may have been illegal if, as Pui-Wing claimed, she was trying to leave the property. According to most trespass law, It is usually illegal to arrest a trespasser and hold them on the property until law enforcement arrives as this defeats the purpose of allowing them to cure the trespass by leaving.

After Pui-Wing was released, Benioff wrote another letter, to Paul Steiger, accusing Pui-Wing of stalking, with her incursion onto his property as new evidence. At this point, Steiger abandoned his usually emollient attitude toward complaining CEOs. The Journal wrote back what insiders describe as a fuck-you letter. Benioff told confidantes that he'd hired a private investigator to trail Pui-Wing, but Journal managers were not aware of any such threats.

The Journal shied away from mention of the contretemps in Pui-Wing's May 26 article on Benioff's Hawaii property. The reporter's detention was the juiciest angle to the story, certainly more interesting than a run-of-the-mill report on luxury second homes in Hawaii. The San Francisco bureau chief, Steve Yoder, told Pui-Wing to include a personal note about her detention. But it was deleted, after some debate, by Wall Street Journal management in New York.

It would be easy to conclude that the business newspaper had acted to save one of the Bay Area's most well-connected business figures from embarrassment. But it's probably more likely that they saw Pui-Wing's personal account as self-referential, and ultimately not relevant to the purpose of the item.

And that's an indictment, not of the craven business press, but of a tradition of dry and dispassionate reporting that often misses the big story. In this case, missing the open secret of Marc Benioff: that one of Silicon Valley's most prominent executives is in fact a petty tyrant, puffed up by IPO wealth and nauseatingly fawning profiles that he's grown to believe.

The Benioff story [Valleywag special]