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There's no denying that Rupert Murdoch built up quite a media empire over the decades -- but that was almost all entirely focused on newspaper and pay TV. While he's spent the past few decades trying to do stuff on the internet, he has an impressively long list of failures over the years. There are many stories of him buying internet properties (Delphi, MySpace, Photobucket) or starting them himself (iGuide, Fox Interactive, The Daily) and driving them into the ground (or just flopping right out of the gate). While his willingness to embrace the internet early and to try things is to be commended, his regular failures to make his internet ventures successful has pretty clearly soured him on the internet entirely over the years.
Indeed, over the past few years, Murdoch or Murdoch surrogates (frequently News Corp's CEO Robert Thomson) have bashed the internet at every opportunity, no matter how ridiculous. Almost all of these complaints can be summed up simply: big internet companies are making money and News Corp. isn't -- and therefore the problem is with those other companies which should be forced to give News Corp. money.
[...] Rupert is thinking along similar lines, and earlier this week released a bizarre and silly statement saying Facebook should start paying news sites "carriage fees" a la cable companies:
The time has come to consider a different route. If Facebook wants to recognize 'trusted' publishers then it should pay those publishers a carriage fee similar to the model adopted by cable companies. The publishers are obviously enhancing the value and integrity of Facebook through their news and content but are not being adequately rewarded for those services. Carriage payments would have a minor impact on Facebook's profits but a major impact on the prospects for publishers and journalists.
We've seen this kind of thinking many times before. First the argument was used against Craigslist. Then Google. And now, apparently, Facebook. The short version is "these internet companies are making money, we news companies aren't -- ergo, the successful internet companies should be paying the failing news companies."
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 28 2018, @02:57AM (4 children)
Trusted Sources? Murdoch? Your kidding.
(Score: 4, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 28 2018, @03:03AM
No, my kidding, not yourn! Fairly Unbalanced News! And Remember, you can take the Megan Kelly out of the Fox News, but you cannot take the Fox News out of the Megan Kelly!
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 28 2018, @04:38AM (2 children)
Rupert is just milking Lex Luther's clever rebranding of the information issue as a trust issue, and he'd better, because fighting the real argument would be Rupert bringing a knife to a gun fight; Fox News Viewers Uninformed, NPR Listeners Not, Poll Suggests [forbes.com].
(Score: 4, Funny) by c0lo on Sunday January 28 2018, @10:19AM
Ah... and that started sooo promising.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: -1, Troll) by Ethanol-fueled on Sunday January 28 2018, @06:13PM
Your linked article suggesting that NPR listeners are more informed than Fox News watchers is dated 2011, and that supposition was most certainly true back then. Now the "informed readers" are the drudge/zerohedge/pol/national interest/specialty IRC and Usenet crowd.
Hindsight is always 20/20 -- only 5 or so few years ago, I considered Salon/The Economist/The New Yorker "informed reading." It's like that dumb phase you go through in high school where you color your hair blue and listen to grunge and think racism is bad.