PRESENT TENSE: FOR THE PAST week, we have been treated to the ignominious sight of an elderly man, his power on the wane, taking on forces he can neither fully comprehend nor control, desperate to stave off defeat one last time.
Recalling Lear raging on the heath or Ahab chasing the whale, Rupert Murdoch is going to war with the internet, and it doesn’t look like he is going to back down.
The whale, in this case, is Google News and online news aggregators, which Murdoch has accused of being “kleptomaniacs” and “parasites”, stealing content from his stable of news-content producers.
This hasn’t been a good year for any industry, of course, but newspapers are feeling particularly exposed, with circulation on a downward spiral and advertising revenues taking a rather more direct path south. Across the US and Europe, papers are haemorrhaging money, staff and paying readers. While there are a number of reasons, the internet has decisively changed the operating environment (though a lack of younger readers was an ominous problem back when surfing involved getting your hair wet and browsing was done in bookshops). Finally, this old versus new media struggle is getting its battle royale, its rumble in the jungle, now that Murdoch has his sights on Google. Not since Rothermere and Beaverbrook has anybody embodied the newspaper industry to the same extent as Murdoch, while Google practically controls the web.
As an opening salvo, Murdoch claims he is going to prevent Google indexing News Corp websites, while simultaneously erecting pay walls, forcing prospective readers to pay for content. Google News, however, doesn’t quite match up to the villainous caricature of perfidious bandits – a quick News search reveals no ads on the page, so accusations that Google is directly profiting at the expense of news organisations is hard to reconcile.
And clicking on any headline brings you to the website of the news organisation responsible for the story. In this way, Google is giving priority to content from established news organisations, offering those old media outlets a dedicated shop window for their wares, if you will.
In an attempt to understand Murdoch's logic, I applied his rationale to a business I'm fairly familiar with. During the many years I worked in my family's newsagents, I witnessed customers come in the door for the express purpose of buying a newspaper. Almost as often, they also purchased some other items – a bag of Rancheros, say, or 20 John Player Blue, or a can of Fanta. Now, by the Rule of Rupert, those other sales were due to the presence of the newspapers, and ergo those newspapers should be getting a reasonable slice of the margin the newsagent is making on those crisps, cigarettes and soft drinks. Once you adopt Murdoch's perspective, it's entirely reasonable that papers demand a slice of all newsagents' non-paper sales. Furthermore, extending Murdoch's fair use argument to its logical conclusion, Sky News will have to cancel that late-night segment where they discuss the following day's front pages. And if this became convention, wave farewell to It Says in the Papers– a parasite on the airwaves if ever there was one.
All this is to say that Murdoch’s arguments are not just unworkable, they’re absurd. Removing your content from Google is easy, but to do that would be the online equivalent of withdrawing your paper from all the shops that don’t give you a cut of their confectionery sales.
As for the moral high ground that Murdoch claims to be holding here, he's a lot closer to sea level than he'd like to think. As Jack Shafer pointed out in Slateduring the week, it's a bit rich of Murdoch to complain about the cheapening of journalism.
Murdoch’s journalistic achievements include waging price wars and dumbing down content.
And many a blogger will raise an eyebrow at Murdoch's claim that providing professional journalism is an expensive business, given that the News of the Worldwent to some expense to hack into the phones of various celebrities. If that's what his news organisations need their traditionally high profits for, then most bloggers will be delighted to keep offering their readers a free service.
Admittedly, it’s not just Murdoch arguing that news organisations can ill afford to keep giving their content away – all of us in this business are facing an uncertain, perilous future, though some titles are coping with more equanimity than others.
But the day the world’s newspapers look to Rupert Murdoch to save them from extinction will, I fear, be a pretty decisive indication that the entire industry is beyond saving.
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it,” as the journalist Upton Sinclair famously put it. Unfortunately for Murdoch, it seems the fate of his entire global media empire hangs on his not understanding the internet.
Shane Hegarty returns next week
