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Murdoch Says, "We'll Charge For All Our Sites"

Posted by timothy on from the subverting-the-dominant-paradigm dept.

Oracle Goddess writes "In what appears to be a carefully planned suicide, Rupert Murdoch announced that his media giant News Corporation Ltd intends to charge for all its news websites in a bid to lift revenues, as the transition towards online media permanently changes the advertising landscape. 'The digital revolution has opened many new and inexpensive methods of distribution, but it has not made content free. Accordingly we intend to charge for all our news websites,' Murdoch said."

12 of 881 comments (clear)

  1. Bye, bye. by scotts13 · · Score: 4, Informative

    N/T

    1. Re:Bye, bye. by Jeremy+Erwin · · Score: 4, Informative

      The day Fox start reporting actual NEWS is the day Satan goes to work in a snowplow.

      In Dante's Inferno Satan is trapped in a frozen lake, surrounded by traitors of all description.

    2. Re:Bye, bye. by plaxion · · Score: 5, Informative

      Hope I'm not giving away the ending of the first part for anyone, but... the lake you mention is frozen by the beating of Satan's wings. Other parts of the inferno are plenty hot depending upon the punishment, as in the case of the sodomites wandering on the burning sand with flames falling on them like rain.

      Oh, and since I'm on a roll, Snape kills Dumbledor ;)

    3. Re:Bye, bye. by rtb61 · · Score: 3, Informative

      Currently I get mu news from multiple sources, normally at least 10 with emails from 3, add to that ugh stumbleupon and even this site http://www.newspapers24.com/ (12,000 sources). So what they envisaging subscriptions to all of them, oh yeah, like that's going to happen. There is absolutely zero chance that I will pay for any news subscription, specifically because I do not and will not be tied down to one or two corporate for extreme profit, advertising as news site.

      Hate to burst Rupert's bubble but typical mass media sites have very low reliability when it comes to the truth, and Murdoch's news sites represent some of the biggest most disingenuous and fraudulent liars, who not only distort the news but they also fabricate and hide the news.

      What Rupert Murdoch is really saying is that his lawyers will be going on the offensive, so watch those links, content extracts and even quotes from Fox sites, they even want to be able to charge access to their B$ commentators.

      Interestingly enough my two favourite news sites are http://www.bbc.co.uk/ and http://www.abc.net.au/, so bwah hah hah hah (they both have already been paid for). As for Fox news http://www.fauxnewschannel.com/ is the only version I bother with and, I even rate M$'s MSN sites and their associated sites, way, way ahead of anything associated with - not really - "News Corp" (the corporate equivalent of the Soviet version of Pravda).

      --
      Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
    4. Re:Bye, bye. by geekoid · · Score: 5, Informative

      You should check out public broadcasting.

      PBS does some great news pieces.

      Here in Oregon, OPB is excellent.

      --
      The Kruger Dunning explains most post on /. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
  2. Re:What a nice gift to progressives by bl968 · · Score: 5, Informative

    It proves nothing. You can call a rose,a rose; and a pig, a pig; without being one your self. The history of Fox news is documented even in court cases...

    In February 2003, a Florida Court of Appeals unanimously agreed with an assertion by FOX News that there is no rule against distorting or falsifying the news in the United States...During their appeal, FOX asserted that there are no written rules against distorting news in the media. They argued that, under the First Amendment, broadcasters have the right to lie or deliberately distort news reports on public airwaves. Fox attorneys did not dispute Akre's claim that they pressured her to broadcast a false story, they simply maintained that it was their right to do so. After the appeal verdict WTVT general manager Bob Linger commented, "It's vindication for WTVT, and we're very pleased... It's the case we've been making for two years. She never had a legal claim."

    --
    "GET / HTTP/1.0" 200 51230 "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; Setec Astronomy)"
  3. Shades of grey or colors? by tepples · · Score: 4, Informative

    Silly Americans with their "right wing" vs "left wing" so-called political opinions...

    Nothing in real life is black or white, it's always shades of grey.

    Assume there is a median political position. To the left and right of this are various stances. "Left" politics include civil libertarianism, entitlements for minorities and the working class, and regulation of business; "right" politics generally imply the opposite. Between far left and far right, there are still "shades of grey" as you call them: left, center left, center right, and right.

    It's possible to be left on some issues and right on others. For instance, the Libertarian Party is left on civil libertarianism but right on entitlements and business regulation. But U.S. political parties whose platforms mix "left" and "right" planks virtually never win more than 2% of the popular vote. Perhaps a better analogy isn't "shades of grey" as much as color vs. grayscale.

    1. Re:Shades of grey or colors? by tepples · · Score: 3, Informative

      Assume there is a median political position.

      Assume the political space has more than two dimensions. Your "median" is now an n-dimensional axis

      A set of points in a multidimensional space still has a centroid. To compute the centroid in a Cartesian coordinate system, take the median of the coordinates in each dimension.

      and terms like "left" and "right" are meaningless.

      Erich Fromm and Isaiah Berlin have pointed out two kinds of "liberty": the negative liberty of civil libertarianism and the positive liberty of entitlements. In U.S. politics, support for civil libertarianism and support for entitlements are strongly correlated, and politically successful candidates' stances tend to line up along one line in the political hyperspace. "Left" and "right" are measured along this line.

      Besides, "shades of grey" has only one dimension, namely lightness, which proves the point of my other post that colors are a better model for a political spectrum.

  4. Dumped my subscription... by aaarrrgggh · · Score: 3, Informative

    Used to subscribe to WSJ because I thought the quality was hard to beat. Canceled after far too many articles that were far too self-serving to Murdoch. Then there is Fox News... and...

    Far too out of touch. News Corp is completely lost.

  5. Re:Fox News by Chaos+Incarnate · · Score: 3, Informative

    The theory is that US citizens should be able to figure out for themselves whether what they're watching is news or editorial content, as opposed to having government regulators step in and control the press.

    I'm still not sure how well that's worked out for us, though.

    --
    Benford's Corollary to Clarke's Law: "Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced."
  6. Re:Fox News by Dragonslicer · · Score: 5, Informative

    Yes, Fox News has a pretty large viewership (I would guess that CNN, Fox, and MSNBC are approximately evenly split, but I don't watch any of them so I don't care enough to dig up any numbers), and yes, your assessment is fairly accurate. Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck, and Bill O'Reilly are probably the most well-known Fox News personalities, and they're all extreme ideologues (Beck also has the bonus feature of being completely fucking nuts). If you want a nice Best Of Fox News review, I recommend watching The Daily Show and The Colbert Report; while they'll still make fun of CNN (which seems to have become just a reading of Twitter messages from viewers) and MSNBC (which is almost as ideological as Fox News, but they generally manage to hide the crazy better), Fox News provides by far the most entertaining clips.

  7. Re:What a nice gift to progressives by demachina · · Score: 3, Informative

    Any biography of W you will find clearly tracks that he got in to the Texas Air National Guard using family connections to dodge the draft in Vietnam. He was, trained at great expense to fly obsolete jets that would never get sent to Vietnam. The Texas Air National Guard was designed for rich kids to dodge the draft, because they could become fighter jocks without any risk of seeing combat.

    In the middle of his guard duty he moved to Alabama to work on a political campaign, and anecdotally party hard, though the evidence of his partying and drug use is he said, she said so you can't prove it either. It appears he did no guard duty while he was there. After that he headed to Harvard to get his MBA still before his Texas guard duty was over. You can't nail him for it because there is no documentation left in his Texas Guard files any more in how he managed to use Guard duty to get duck the draft, but fulfilled none of the obligations once he bolted Texas, and suffered no consequence.

    As I said it is a weird case you will only find with the rich and powerful. It is clear from well established biography he didn't finish his guard service, he suffered no repercussions for deserting his guard service and there is no documentation on what happened or how he got away with it. It is pretty clear once he ducked his guard service he should have been prosecuted or drafted but wasn't.

    So its not really bias to try to expose this sordid history of Bush, especially after he sent hundreds of thousands of Americans off to an optional war in Iraq, when he himself was for all practical purposes a draft dodger and deserter. Rather's team was just in a Catch-22, they knew the story to be true, but they also knew there was no way to prove it.

    --
    @de_machina