Blogging politics, culture, sociology and life from Brisvegas
Rupert Murdoch on Sky News:
Make of it what you will. It seems pretty incoherent to me. I think Cory Doctorow’s pretty much right – these musings are fantasies, and his editors are going to have a horrible time trying to implement all these confused thought bubbles.
Elsewhere: Gary Sauer-Thompson.
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I can’t watch all of this and then go to bed – I’ll have bloody nightmares for the rest of the night. Yes rambling and incoherent. If this is the best put-up News Corp can manage to justify its new found indignation about revenue loss, they’re in even more serious trouble than I thought.
So he wants to get rid of fair use? That’s underpants on the head level crazy right there. Or possibly the first signs of senility. There’s bluffing, and then there’s empty bluffing. I cannot see the concept of fair use being overturned in my lifetime; both academia and journalism rely on it.
Very funny and I think spot on Cory.
Rupe’s older than TV and lately dazzled by a sleeper agent coaxing his prostrate with a painted fingernail into fathering a new batch of children with all sorts of interesting new inheritance rights under Chinese law.
When he carks it, News Corp is gonna fly apart like a pizza in a room full of potheads.
Hearst wielded as much power in his time. But if wasn’t for Orson and San Simeon, who’d remember him now?
News Corpse
Thanks, CMMC. I have now have coffee in my keyboard!
Brilliant, Nabokov! You’ve hit the nail on the head.
Rupert Murdoch, a true national hero and treasure.
And if it wasn’t for Elliot Carver in “Tomorrow Never Dies”…?
I was watching Media Watch this morning and I realised where he’s coming from. And he’s on a loser either way.
Back pre internet you had to use the news to find out what was going on. this required going through a gate keeper, paying people like Murdoch for access to information by dead tree or by proxy throough TV and radio (the price being sitting through adverts.)
Win win for Murdoch. He could if he so wanted not only report on the world but shape the world. And even better get paid for it!
Now with the internet he faces competition and an awful choice.
Either try to keep influence by giving news away for free on the internet.
Or loose influence by installing a paywall.
Then there’s the third choice of taking a sledgehammer to the technology much like the clerics wanted to do to printing presses.
And we all know how that worked out.
I defy anyone to watch that Murdoch interview and then say what his vision for the future is. It was a disturbing. He sounded like Grandpa Simpson. “Obama isn’t going very well” Then an attack on Rudd, Google is stealing our work and so it went helped on by an overawed interviewer who was clearly wetting his pants just being in the same room as the Sun King. At the end all I could think was if I had shares in News I would be selling them quick smart.
As media watch demonstrated last night “stealing” stories is a two way street and News is a master of using free content on its online sites.’
I remain puzzled at the awe in which Murdoch is being held by some media commentators with no-one questioning whether the King has any clothes. He built up an empire on a business model that is becoming obsolete. He resisted the Internet for years and now is flailing around for a new economic model to keep his empire afloat. It is clear that if there is one clear strategy it is to attack the public funding models of the Beeb and the ABC but that is about it. That is a battle he will not win. The BBC and the ABC will win when it comes time for politicians to choose. Although I am sure someone soon will poor cold water over Mark Scott and his vision to take over the world. He really is a dill that bloke.
Interestingly Rudd seems to have detected this shift in power and is quite free and eassy with his critcism of Murdoch and his empire. Compare that that wit the story of Howard meeting Rupe about 20 years ago in which the future PM was cowed and awed by the Sun King.
These days politicians can all ignore him if they want.
Nabakov,
by extension of your Hearst comparison, can we expect James to join the Symbionese Liberation Army?
Agree with all that DC@10, esp Mark Scott being a bit of a dill. We need less vanity empire building and more intelligent consolidation and improvement at the ABC.
Although I do give him credit for having Murdoch properly in his sights, just like Rudd has lately.
And Rudd and Scott and anyone else with a spine should go after Murdoch and His Australian and its pathetic denialist crew with even more vigour and confidence, knowing that electorate loves a good public stoush with powerful and unaccountable foes.
Chase the bastards right down the rabbit hole and finish them off.
Knees are shaking within the News Corpse empire. The new print layout proudly paraded in The Australian says it all for me – more white spaces, fewer words.
Um, fair use. OMG, the man is mad. Utterly completely bonkers. (my concentration on this is not helped by me worrying I might have put far too many small shells of pasta into a pot of boiling water ten minutes ago and I’m wondering if they’ll erupt and take over the kitchen.
Rupe, if you ruin my breakfast …
Grace, make that a fox hole. Where is my horn? Some one please rouse the dogs.
Nabakov @3 – very amusing
I agree that when he finally does go News.corpse is likely to fall apart since there doesn’t appear to be anything binding the empire other than one man’s ego and his lust for power. Strange really since most large corporations seem acutely aware of the dangers of dynastic rule, yet time and time again find themselves locked into a key player. Jobs and Apple comes to mind, Gates and Microsoft to a certain extent and I’m sure there are plenty of others.
As for Rupes’ ramblings, he fails to convince me that he has any real idea what to do other than draw a line in the sand and declare you’re either with us or agin us, let’s get it on. Someone should point out to Rupes that while a single news site may not make “serious money” as he puts it, some internet players are making serious money and are doing so without alienating everyone around them.
The confused, hurt bleatings of the last Neanderthal at Gibraltar, wondering why those skinnier apes are so much better chasing down mammoth on the plains.
patrickg @ 16,
Because they’ve got teh Internet to track the mammoths by sattelite?
Well, we could say it’s fairly unsurprising rhetoric from Rupert in the end, but buried under the incoherent ranting is a fair argument.
He has a staff of reporters (experience, political leaning and attentiveness excused) that create news content (of questionable value/quality) that he is expected to provide for free while Google will gain revenues from advertising far in excess of what News could charge and they are only required to just pass on the hard work of others at a much lower cost.
Google are making money from the direct use of other people’s content, content that someone worked hard on (presumably). If I chose to retransmit or republish any other media without permissions/royalties, I would be in breach of copyright, so why is it acceptable here?
Remove the evil empire angle for a moment and consider that someone makes a livelihood from writing and publishing the news those jobs do not exist if no one wants to pay for the content somewhere.
Yes we do have other sources of news, and the internet is a powerful tool for letting people report and comment on news, but we aren’t professional journalists, we cannot spend that sort of time researching, writing and publishing news because we have to earn our own living we don’t have that time.
I agree that there are still problems in journalism, a lot of which Murdoch has a lot to answer for, but I doubt we will be well served by selling out the livelihoods of every paid reporter on the planet just to prop up the bottom like of Google.
PinkyOz
Indeed Paul, to be consistent the abolition of fair use, ie quoting parts of the News Corpse drivel would mean abolishing it for all written material, ie books, scientific journals etc etc. A student would not be able to cite parts of academic works in an assignment unless specific deals were made with the author.
(I get it, I think Rupe wants to abolish all education so no one will be able to read at all, that’ll fuck Google!)
I think he has succeeded in one tiny little respect—we’re currently talking about a fight between Newscorp and the great public broadcasters.
Congrats, Rupe! You’ve successfully framed the debate for the last months of 2009!
Of course that doesn’t change the fact that the last time I looked Channel Nine’s website is integrated with MSN, and Channel Seven’s with Yahoo. And both hybrid entities provide written news articles for free.
And Murdoch is on record saying he wants his pay-per-view sites to be structured like the free email accounts myself and millions of other Australians have with… MSN and Yahoo.
(Also, anyone notice how Uncle Rupe declared Obama would prefer the G8 and G20 forums didn’t exist, that the president really wants a G2 comprised of China and the US? Murdoch obviously said that as a way of kowtowing to Beijing and Shanghai, but I can’t help but think that this Machiavellian say-one-thing-mean-something-else type logic hasn’t totally consumed the old man.)
Reminds me of this actually.
“We subsidise our competitors because we want people to have choice”?! Is that what MX is?
2 or 3 passports?! And abolishing fair use is so incredibly insane.
Is Rupe on Ibogaine? I do not think he was incoherent at all, just apres lunch with a bottle of Chateau lafitte aboard and it possibly reacted with his medication. But overall, he was good humoured (except when talking about the BBC, when he lost it a bit) and not too bad for a 78-year-old. He seemed to be across the things he knew, and bluffed and bullshitted his way where he didn’t. Like most peopele. The most interesting part of the interview for me was his double-backing on EMT, he was very bolshie about anthropogenic global warming for a while, at the instigation of his missus but seems now to be sliding back – perhaps someone should send the clip to Wendy.
He is still a political player in the US and here – underestimate him at your peril. Or let me put it another way, if he’s crazy, he’s crazy like a Fox.
The MSM, of whom Rupe is the doyen, have lost all credibility along with the Bush administration, whose lies they dutifully reported without question. The talk of quality journalism is just that, talk, mouthed by the very people who deliberately killed it off. I look forward to seeing how many
acolytesreaders Andrew Blot will attract when they have to pay…Should we care? If he puts up a paywall and blocks bots from indexing the articles should we care?
Anything that hastens the departure of News Ltd from a position of influence has to be applauded. That Rupe himself should be the author of his empire’s own demise is exquisite. Far better than the heirs doing it a la Packer. I can imagine Rupe’s amazement at discovering the Sun’s page 3 girls no longer cut it when so much flesh is available for free on the intertubes. Rudd’s memorial should feature a George and the dragon scene in recognition he was the first to realise Rupe was no longer someone to be afraid of. You have to feel sorry for Rupe’s minions, left like the GDR border guards twenty years ago today bereft of the awesome power they only so recently wielded.
I’ve been thinking a lot about this. I’m a geek, but not an “information wants to be free” geek. I just can’t see a rupertolicious outcome.
Rupert does the robots thing – No google referrals to any rupertsite
Rupert claims Google infringing in court – Google drops listed rupersites
Rupert claims that google is discriminating against RupertNews by refusing to return results that Rupert claims are a copyright infringement – Judge says WTF?
Rupert claims that headlines can be googled, but not if they give the story away – different judges in different countries disagree
I don’t believe that people will pay for news. They might pay for more detailed news in areas that they are concerned about. Crikey is probably a good example here, but I’d love to see their subscriber numbers in an election versus non-election year
In an alternate universe:
Google results do not mention rupertnews so people go to rupert sites and pay to see information.
Having said that, I’ve reservations about the veracity of on-line news anyway. If it’s not Rupertnews, or ABCNews, where does the stamp of reliability come from for a consumer?
I wish I had shares in the Onion.
What percentage of their news stories does News Corpse actually break? I was under the impression that most “journalists” today are engaged in copying and pasting press releases or wire service stories, and I’ve seen little to convince me otherwise.
Mind you, I haven’t read a paper in years. My news all comes from online or electronic media.