Rupert Murdoch’s Newest Scheme

Rupert Murdoch, head of global media conglomerate News Corp., recently announced that he will attempt to remove the stories published by his media outlets from Google's search index, allegedly as a way to encourage people to purchase news content online. As Bobbie Johnson of The Guardian writes,

Rupert Murdoch, head of global media conglomerate News Corp., recently announced that he will attempt to remove the stories published by his media outlets from Google's search index, allegedly as a way to encourage people to purchase news content online. As Bobbie Johnson of The Guardian writes,

"In recent months, Murdoch and his lieutenants have stepped up their war of words with Google, accusing it of "kleptomania" and acting as a "parasite" for including News Corp. content in its Google News pages. But asked why News Corp. executives had not chosen to simply remove their websites entirely from Google's search indexes – a simple technical operation – Murdoch said just such a move was on the cards."

Murdoch's claims that the inclusion of newspaper articles on Google's search indexes encourages illegal access to copyrighted material and will cost News Corp significant amounts of revenue, to be generous, is entirely false. As Jeff Jarvis of BuzzMachine writes,

"News Corp. leaving Google would be a mosquito bite on an elephant’s ass. Unnotice by Google or by the audience. For there will always be – as Murdoch laments – free competitors: the BBC and Australian Broadcasting Corp, which he and his son complain about, not to mention the Guardian, the Telegraph, NPR, CBC, and any sensible news organization worldwide."

This type of rhetoric on the part of big media executives is becoming increasingly common as the power of hypertextual communication and what Jarvis calls the "link economy" is popularized and embraced by such short-format social media platforms as Twitter. In Canada, through the example of CanWest, we've seen the spectacular failures that precipitate when media conglomerates refuse to acknowledge the ways that the open Internet is transforming and reimagining the most basic ways that citizens access information.

Citizens from around the world should have access to the information they seek on their own terms, rather than having their choices guided and structured by the outdated business models that figures like Murdoch cling to. If News Corp. doesn't want citizens accessing their news stories, then good riddance. To again quote Jarvis, "the business failure here is Murdoch’s, not Google’s."

For more information on this issue, visit BuzzMachine at http://www.buzzmachine.com/2009/11/23/murdoch-madness-2/ and Johnson's article at http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/nov/09/murdoch-google.

For more information on News Corp., visit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NewsCorp#Holdings