Journalists who for months had covered Napster's intriguing rise must have been despondent, too. Many of them longed for the glory days when virtually every media outlet in the country took a bite out of the Shawn Fanning story, dutifully chronicling (all together now) the way the 19-year-old whiz had developed his revolutionary software at Boston's Northeastern University after his roommate complained about how difficult it was to find MP3 files online. We all read about how Napster had turned the music industry upside down with fear.

Fortune magazine was dead-on when it called Napster the "Hot Idea of the Year." And while it's unusual for a company as revenue-challenged as Napster to emerge as the darling of the business press (the company's total revenues to date are still zero), what journalist wouldn't want to help document such a buzz machine?

But the avalanche of Napster coverage, with its attendant exegesis on copyright law, intellectual property and ISPs, hasn't always produced such good journalism. Too often the complicated dispute between the online start-up and the music industry has been painted in the most simplistic terms -- a reductive tale of forward-thinking entrepreneurs outsmarting head-in-the-sand label executives.

Fortune small-business columnist David Lidsky summed up the conventional wisdom perfectly. "Rooting for the record companies is like rooting for some kind of combined conglomerate of the New York Yankees and Dallas Cowboys," he wrote, tongue only slightly in cheek. "Let's face it, they're evil."

The music industry is a greedy, glacially slow-moving machine. It has a history of treating artists and consumers poorly. And if there's an industry outside cigarette and gun manufacturers in greater need of a massive PR makeover, I'd like to see it. But does low public approval mean the press gets a free pass to write and interpret as it pleases?

From the get-go, disturbing signs suggested the press was more interested in advancing Napster's story as a David-vs.-Goliath tale than in seriously addressing the intricate issues at hand.

Take early and influential Napster proponent Indiana University sophomore Chad Paulson, who had led a national crusade to keep Napster on campuses. The press, which spent last winter dialing Paulson for quotes, suddenly lost his number after he posted an open letter on his popular Students Against University Censorship Web site (the site was promptly hacked), urging Napster to "take a stand on piracy." The media seemed reluctant to stray too far from the established script (i.e. college students love the fiercely independent Napster).

Then came Metallica. The legendary heavy metal band stepped into a press feeding frenzy when they became the first individual act to sue Napster for copyright infringement. (Rapper Dr. Dre later followed suit.) At almost every turn the band has been greeted by a hostile press. Metallica essentially became a media punching bag.

Inside.com labeled the band "a corporate ho," while Forbes writers teased the band, theorizing, "Metallica was probably invited to the MTV Movie Awards because of all its anti-Napster publicity." Then again, maybe the invite had something to do with the fact that Metallica had a video lodged inside MTV's top 10 and was headlining one of the summer's biggest stadium tours.

From the outset, baffled journalists wondered why a band that allows fans to make bootleg copies of their live shows would object to online file-swapping. The New York Times called the contradiction "puzzling." Yet no matter how many times drummer Lars Ulrich explained that Metallica's generous bootleg policy was the result of a decision the band had made about their own music (whereas Napster offered no say in the widespread distribution of copyrighted material), the press couldn't get their minds around it. From the Nation: "Metallica seems to have forgotten that it got rich through free music shared by loyal fans. Now the band is harassing and exposing its followers who still believe in the value of sharing and community."

Months after the bootleg question was raised, Time magazine was still telling readers that last week's Napster showdown in federal court was, among other things, about "What Metallica thinks about fans making bootleg recordings of its concerts."

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