OPINION:Google's cheap assembly of expensively created news content threatens the independence and quality of journalism, writes TIM LUCKHURST.
GOOGLE BOSS Eric Schmidt deserves a kind of respect, the kind a sparrow gives a cat. For the chairman of a company that uses expensive journalism for free to address the Newspaper Association of America takes cheek as well as guts. And Schmidt's manner combines insolence with chutzpah. His support for the economic model whereby newspapers pay for content and Google milks the profits provoked Robert Thomson, the editor of the Times of London, to describe content aggregators as "tapeworms in the intestines of the internet".
But tapeworms are rarely fatal. Google’s conduct is the sort of favour crystal meth does for an addict: it feeds immediate appetite to the detriment of health.
Google uses the work of journalists to sell advertising. Then it takes Daddy Bear’s share of the profits and justifies its gluttony on the basis that it drives traffic back to the newspaper’s own site. This is like a musician stealing a song, recording it, and excusing their crime on the basis that the illegal cover version may draw attention to the original.
The immediate effects of Google’s relationship with journalism are newsroom redundancies, newspaper closures and declining profits among the survivors. These are among the reasons why hardly anybody seems to care.
With journalists as popular as syphilis and their proprietors even less loved, it falls to a group with approximately comparable public status to fight our corner. I am grateful to members of parliament, but reporting needs their help like an innocent neck needs a guillotine.
What journalism requires is for Google users to understand why news matters and why it cannot be supplied for free.
I do not care whether Rupert Murdoch or the Barclay brothers continue to make profits. Newspaper owners have come and gone throughout the era of representative democracy and these guys are no less disposable than Max Beaverbrook or the Kemsley brothers. It does not matter greatly if printed newspapers are replaced entirely by web-based products. The only thing that is crucial is that fact-gathering, revelatory journalism must survive and that it must be published by organisations entirely independent of government. Google’s business model is incompatible with this goal.
Google does not understand journalism. It just wants content that drives traffic. The cheapest, most derivative churnalism will do this, but original reporting does it better. So Google aggregates stories written by expensive, professional reporters and blithely overlooks how much these people cost to train, hire and deploy.
The tiny pittances it remits to news organisations will not pay for a fraction of the political, business, foreign and investigative reporting we are accustomed to. But Google does not care. It imagines the fourth estate is a derelict development somewhere in fantasy land and that journalism is just another tradeable commodity.
There is a depressing irony here. At the dawn of the internet era, pioneers such as Matt Drudge predicted the net would liberate citizens to produce and consume their own news without recourse to the gatekeepers of old-fashioned Big Media. Instead millions of dupes take news free from Google, the biggest gatekeeper of all, while unconsciously collaborating in the destruction of independent newsrooms with the courage and skill to hold power to account.
Google’s technology is modern, but its rapacious conduct is as old as unfettered market capitalism. It wants to fill its coffers at minimum cost just as Victorian factory owners wanted to manufacture without trade unions and statutory working hours. It must not be allowed to get away with a ruthless economic model that will destroy ethical, fact-based journalism.
Representative democracy in the absence of free, diverse and well-funded news reporting has not yet been attempted. It would have calamitous consequences for freedom and accountability.
A healthy democracy needs professional journalists to report accurately on public affairs, to find out things the powerful want to hide and to expose wrongdoing. These duties have been performed by journalists throughout the era of universal suffrage and in every country in which liberty flourishes. People who deride this claim as idealistic naivety are enemies of parliamentary democracy. Its supporters must learn to appreciate that good journalism is worth paying for.
Nothing Schmidt says on behalf of his colossal multinational should fool any democrat into imagining Google has devised a plausible alternative.
Tim Luckhurst is a journalist with the
Guardian
. This article appeared first in the commentisfree section of the newspaper’s website, www.guardian.co.uk