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Rupert Murdoch Pushes Facebook To Pay For News To Guarantee Quality (bloomberg.com)

Posted by BeauHD on from the highest-bidder dept.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Rupert Murdoch, the media billionaire who controls the Wall Street Journal, called on Facebook to begin paying publishers fees to carry the news that its users post and share online in a sign of the print industry's growing frustration with social media. "If Facebook wants to recognize 'trusted' publishers then it should pay those publishers a carriage fee similar to the model adopted by cable companies," Murdoch, the executive chairman of News Corp. said Monday in a statement. "The publishers are obviously enhancing the value and integrity of Facebook through their news and content but are not being adequately rewarded for those services." "Facebook and Google have popularized scurrilous news sources through algorithms that are profitable for these platforms but inherently unreliable," Murdoch said. "Recognition of a problem is one step on the pathway to cure, but the remedial measures that both companies have so far proposed are inadequate, commercially, socially and journalistically." Murdoch, who also leads 21st Century Fox, called for a system similar to that in cable television, where large distributors like Comcast and AT&T pay fees to the TV network owners that attract their viewers.

2 of 104 comments (clear)

  1. Murdoch sucks and his audience are morons. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Interesting

    Elites, mainstream media, ...

    Fox News IS the mainstream media. They are the #1 Cable news network.

    Elites? WTF are the elites?

    Fox News makes people uninformed; NPR informs them. I know, I know, Forbes is a Liberal rag.

    Or how Fox News makes folks less informed than those that don't even watch the news! Again, NPR for the best informed.

    And I don't know about you, but I consider Rupert Murdoch to be an elite himself - you know, a billionaire who has huge amounts of political power.

  2. If anyone did journalism, I'd probably pay for it by Riceballsan · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Right now it seems like we've got 2 real camps for news. The mainstream media, which 99% of the time their extent of "journalism" is to read the press releases/talking points of the corporations, politicians, political parties etc... that help fund them, and expend zero resources finding out whether any of it is actually true or not. Then we have the wild west of free media. A world where they take the same press releases, then pull out of their ass whatever interpretation and guesses they can make from that fit the bias's of the target audience. Neither type is worth the pixels on the screen they are written on