AllThingsD:

In fact, the creation of a $20 million investment kitty that Arrington has dubbed CrunchFund is simply the formalization of a long-standing arrangement that has already been going on since he founded his popular tech blog.

That is to say, in which the basic standards of journalism are first warped by calling it newfangled truth-telling and then endlessly corroded by using a wily and unusually aggressive combination of favors and threats to extract, from start-ups and VCs in need of press, both exclusive access and information.

TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington was given his walking papers by AOL this week (at least as head of TechCrunch, though he appears still to be employed by AOL Ventures) after it was revealed that he started a venture capital fund; the move violates generally accepted journalistic standards (and indeed goes against AOL’s policy). AllThingsD’s Kara Swisher, already an outspoken critic of Arrington, assembled her thoughts in a particularly vituperative editorial that, for maximum effect, should be read while listening to Gerald Fried’s music from the original Star Trek episode “Amok Time.”