Welcome to the ultimate Möbius strip—a newspaper reporting about a reality show about a newspaper. The New York Daily News, flailing wildly in their attempt to battle the New York Post juggernaut, is trying something new to save the ship—a reality show. This is so dirty and wrong on so many levels it’s hard to figure out where to begin. It’s one thing for washed up TV actors like Brady boy Christopher Knight to mug for VH1’s cameras and ego franchise Donald Trump to show off his bad taste apartment decor, but when tabloid news reporters become entertainment, it’s clear that reality programming, and perhaps reality itself, has veered into dangerous territory. Entitled “Tabloid Wars” and shot last summer (long before the Daily News had a chance to jab the Post about their Page Six scandal), the show lasts for six one-hour episodes of “hard news gathering” by the paper’s reporters. Speaking about the show to the media, Daily News gossip writer George Rush said, “They kind of had to talk us into it. It was a little bit annoying at first. They call it a reality show because that’s what sells, but it really is more of a traditional documentary.” Yeah right, George, you keep telling yourself that. The only thing worse than participating in a reality show (and in this case, not even getting paid!) is to deny that you are, in fact, a reality show character. Assuming the Post doesn’t go down this sticky path as well, they have now won by default… 

Speaking of the house that Rupert built, we found the recent Wired cover sporting Murdoch (“Rupert Murdoch, Teen Idol!” July 2006) not only fascinating but baffling. Ever since Conde Nast took over the title the ad pages plunged and the content got fluffier, nevertheless Editor-in-Chief Chris Anderson (author of the the huckterish The Long Tail) has managed to keep up the mirage that Wired is still in touch with emerging trends. OK, so yeah, Rupert bought MySpace. But the social networking site was developed and popularized by the company's founder Tom Anderson way back in 2003. Whatever happened to the days when Wired railed against pandering to big shots and actually gave up and coming entrepreneurs their due? Sure Rupert's imperious glare, elephantine neck folds, old super-rich dude suit and fuck-you sneer sells copies, but if Wired is no longer the place to find new media maverick's like Anderson, then where do we go? As if to punctuate the complete rewriting of history, Murdoch has re-branded the New York Fox News site as MyFoxNY.com and the recently acquired Channel 9 News has been renamed “My 9 News.” The entire pretense that suddenly Fox News is “yours” simply because you can post pages on MySpace is so laughably simplistic it will probably work. The Murdoch formula still wins.