In this day and age, media companies would have to be stupid to not try and get a piece of the pie. As the NASDAQ dances with 5,000 and the Dow palpitates like an obese man running stairs, it is obvious that the place to be is in tech stocks. Specifically, the place to be is any dotcom that has an idea that sounds like it hasn't yet been done -- note that the idea need not be good, necessarily, just original.

Last Wednesday, MSNBC ran an article entitled 'The Rise and Fall of Netscape,' treating the demise and dissolution of the original New Economy powerhouse. Now, a piece like this is all well and good, but isn't MSNBC partly owned by Microsoft, which makes a little program called Internet Explorer, which sort of drove Netscape out of the market? The story is the Internet version of the 'My kid beat up your honor roll student' bumper sticker.

A shining example of such crossover is the Brill's Content-Contentville deal, treated at some length by Matt Welch in our sister publication, the Online Journalism Review. There are, of course, many more. StarMedia partners with L'Oreal to set up a women's portal. NBC and Ralph Lauren link up to bring Polo et. al to the Internet, in large part through the peacock's Net property, NBCi. The latest and greatest, of course, is the possible domestic partnership between Yahoo! and News Corp., the Standard Oil of the media business.

There is evidence that in this day and age that the Internet is having a bad effect on journalistic ethics. The opportunities in this frenetic economy are so tremendous, it's hard to fault companies that have a profit motive for trying to dip in to the Fountain of Cash that is the stock market. The only problem is that the content side still has to go on writing about the very people the business side is jumping into bed with.

Years ago in Phoenix, one of the lead anchors on the CBS (now Fox) affiliate was married to the Attorney General of the state. Needless to say, it was a problem. What happens when the other anchor is sick, a replacement can't be found, and your husband's office just announced a major bust of some variety? Do you read the copy, and then at end say, 'I should note that the Attorney General is also the father of my children'? This never happened, but it could have. The same goes with the online business.

Imagine this scenario: NBCi has a link to a story about Ralph Lauren getting busted for selling seconds as top quality material. You click the link, and a new window pops up to play a streaming video of the story. The pop-up window has ads at the bottom of the screen. The ad server, programmed to, well, serve ads to the page, randomly places an ad for Polo while the story is playing. None of this has actually ever happened, so far as I know, but it could.

It is generally bad business practice to plan based on some far-reaching hypothetical situation. But time was in the journalism business that just the thought of such a scenario being possible would be enough to kill any partnership like the Lauren/NBCi deal. Now, deals of that ilk are closed regularly. While everyone questions the ethical propriety of such relationships, these outfits plow ahead with their dealmaking.

As sites that aggregate the news get more popular (see Slate's review last week), copying Yahoo! News's model, the problem compounds. What news of the corporate partner gets linked? What gets ignored? If you pass on stories about it completely, your site is accused of selling out and abandoning its ethics. If you cover it all out, the partner gets angry and threatens to yank its dollars, which causes fits of a conniptive nature on the corporate end of the hallway.

The Guardian of England discussed the importance of aggregators last month. In the article, Guardian editor David Rowan said, 'There is plenty of mediocre content on the web that demands filtering. That is why a trusted editorial service will always have a value - whether a billion-dollar publishing empire, or a shoestring 'web-log' service that tips off users about the gems its editors have uncovered.' Rowan's statement summarizes three very important points: The Web has lots of content that has to be condensed down. Thus the importance of the Moreover's of the world. These aggregators must be trusted above all else. Their integrity and committment to in-depth accuracy needs to be paramount. Even the slightest hint of tainted coverage makes them useless. These sites are very valuable. They have the potential to have millions of diverse users, which means they have the potential to generate substantial ad revenue, and to drive significant traffic to the sites they index. One can understand why News Corp. would have an interest in Yahoo and its news service.

There is just too much fraternization going on between news outlets and corporations. The L.A. Times - Staples Center deal was treated ad nauseum, and with good reason. Why didn't the MSNBC-Netscape story raise eyebrows? This is not asked to question the integrity of Merrill Brown and his shop at MSNBC; they provide a high-quality news service that proves itself resourceful time and time again. However, you have to wonder if anyone over there asked, 'is this a good idea? Should we really write something like this?' I certainly hope so, even if his or her concerns were rejected.

Is there a solution? Maybe some outlets should just stay away from some stories. Perhaps MSNBC, rather than saying where appropriate that Microsoft is one of its corporate parents, should instead just provide links to external sites that produce Microsoft news. Perhaps NBCi should do the same with the fashion industry. Aggregators that have corporate partners, or VC money, could link to other aggregators that carry news of the partner in question. This is of course an idealistic suggestion, one that is less likely to happen than The Onion buying the New York Times. Nonetheless, somebody needs to raise a practical solution, and soon. The wall between corporate and content is crumbling fast, and if it isn't stopped, the results will be disastrous for objective content.