By Darryl Mason
News Ltd CEO John Hartigan defines the kind of quality journalism that he believes Australians will soon be paying to read online at Murdoch media sites :
It will have to be well researched, brilliantly written, perceptive and intelligent, professionally edited, accurate and reliable.I'm guessing then that in the Pay To Read future of Murdoch news sites that a story like this, from news.com.au yesterday, will be a freebie :
Quality will be defined as content that is original, useful, unavailable elsewhere and relevant.
Media Watch takes a closer look at some of the Hartigan-praised Murdoch media "well researched, brilliantly written, perceptive and intelligent, professionally edited, accurate and reliable" stories that flowed across nearly all of Murdoch's Australian news sites, including the Daily Telegraph and the supposedly far more reputable The Australian, in the wake of Michael Jackson's death. All three stories have since been debunked by bloggers and not by the newspapers that originally published them :
Deborah Rowe Said Michael Jackson Children Aren't His
(The Daily Telegraph online, 29th June, 2009)
Jacko's Autopsy Results - Bald and a Skeleton
(The Daily Telegraph online, 29th June, 2009)
Jackson 'Overdosed Regularly'
(The Australian online, 29th June, 2009)
This is what the nanny, Grace Rwaramba, who a Murdoch fire starter falsely claimed regularly pumped Michael Jackson's stomach due to drug overdoses, had to say about the fabricated quotes published alongside her name on numerous Murdoch news sites and in just about every newspaper in the doom-speckled empire :
"The statements attributed to me confirm the worst in human tendencies to sensationalize tragedy and smear reputations for profit."She'll never get a book deal with Harper Collins with that kind of talk.
But Grace Rwaramba was right, she nailed the truth, acutely. Tragedy was sensationalised and the profits are vast (if brief). As always. As has been the Golden Rule in the Murdoch media for almost 50 years.
For all of John Hartigan's pipe-and-tweeds aroma-soaked talk of the important role that "real journalists" and "quality journalism" plays in democratic society (and I couldn't agree more), making up shit to cash in on tragedy and horror and grief will always remain the essential core of Rupert Murdoch's profit margin.
"Well researched, brilliantly written, perceptive and intelligent, professionally edited, accurate and reliable" news stories....Well, who doesn't want all that in the newspapers we buy? And why does he need to point it out as some kind of aspirational? Shouldn't that already be the standard for all journalism?
The big problem for Hartigan is he knows better than most that it's the sensationalized tragedy and smearing of reputations-type stories that really shifts the newspaper bundles.
Used to shift those bundles, anyway.
Before the old business models of how to run a hugely, consistently profitable news corporation that maintained a semi-visible facade of self-respect, for the most part, turned to dust in the hands of Murdoch executives like John Hartigan.
But Hartigan would rather blame "the bloggers" than his own corporation's debasement of society for all those lost readers, and fast-fading profits.
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