What part of that was difficult or laudable? When he starts suffering personally or professionally to do the right thing there will be something to congratulate him for.
Sometimes it doesn’t matter who you are if you can make things better.
http://www.itworld.com/business/63085/lastfm-tech-crunch-and...
He's a very opportunistic person. Ranting against popular business practices produces great publicity. So does posting a very damaging but completely unverified rumor. Arrington has done both, which is why he is hardly the Robin Hood of web2.0.
Yes, occasionally Arrington's flamebaits produce some good. But overall TechCrunch is a mediocre and irresponsible "publication". I think it's a tragedy that the network effect has resulted in a clown running the most important blog about web start-ups. Imagine if the WSJ or NYT was run like TC.
On the other hand had the last.fm story been true the fall out could have been as "big" as this.
In that case he made a serious and unacceptable mistake in reporting very dodgy "information received". But he reported it for the right reasons and deserves some respect for that (IMO).