Old Media Rages Against Twitter Raging Against The Election

'Why Are You Yelling At Me On Social Media When I'm Only Trying To Wind You Up And Make You React Angrily So I Can Report How Abusive You Are?'

By Darryl Mason

It was inevitable Australia's Old Media and social media, primarily Twitter, would reach end-game territory around a federal election.

That election appears to this one, Federal Election 2019.

It's been a bit grim seeing Old Media's entrenched political journalists lashing out at those they deem "trolls" and "abusers", along with huge sections of their own audiences, including paying customers/subscribers.

Not many from Old Media Press Gallery are coping well as mere people off the street with phones analyse, quote and post political news videos and commentary to bigger audiences on Twitter and Facebook and Instagram than Old Media can often muster, and faster.

But it's been satisfying to see at least a few of the standard cliches of Old Media political news coverage during a federal election have been deflated by social media, like over-reliance on polls and opinion, and so then quietly retreated by Old Media.

If Australians interested in political news have more social media options than ever to get the news that matters, including following and engaging with the politicians themselves, and the feast of fact-checking in comments that usually follows any politician's policy tweets, and there is no shortage of free opinion (all the best writers are on Twitter), then what exactly is left for the 270 member Australian Press Gallery to do to try and lure the political news away from their Twitter timelines? To find that new generation of paying customers?

What can the Old Media-controlled Press Gallery provide that former journalists and public servants and former politicians and senior ministers and all the others with long political experience on social media cannot supply, for free?

Exclusive access to politicians?

Big deal. Has that exclusive access delivered better policies and information to the Australian people? Or do politicians feel free to lie and deceive even more relentlessly now, during Exclusive Interviews, because they know The Interview Routine better than many journalists do?

Has the political industry itself gamed out most of the old political media's best efforts before they even get started?

How many politicians have been caught out in outrageous lies and had to Resign In Disgrace after interviews with Australia's Best Political Journalists, in the past 5 years? Or past decade? Any at all?

What is The Product we're being told is worth buying?

Press Gallery journalists have more duties and live crosses now than in any previous decade. The depth of their daily research is always limited. So they have less time than jobless ex-public servants on Twitter have to actually read through 400 page reports and supply timely analysis.

On social media, just in Australia, there are hundreds of now jobless former public servants who do this analysis work, daily, for free. They should be earning something, particularly when so much of their work acts as research for paid journalists, but they don't stop doing it because they're not paid.

21st century journalists have already realised social media is the greatest research tool journalism has ever had access to. You can ask for help and get it, on almost any subject, if the Google isn't helping. If you say on Twitter you are unsure about info, good people, people who know, will often try and help you. This is not something to be afraid of.

On social media, a journalist can search for people who specialise in a subject that they're writing about, contact them and get help, quicker than a phone call. That kind of fast access to people and good information and research is like a 1970s journalist's ultimate work-related fantasy.

Social media is information, a living breathing world library of info, facts and people who know things.

This New Reality will maybe, finally, sink through to those still bogged down in Old Media bubbles, but for now there's a lot of anger, vitriol and bitterness coming from many in Australian news media, mostly towards their news audiences, probably because it's elections time. But there's not a lot of attempts to understand the news audience the Press Gallery needs to exist is right there in front of them, interacting with them, trying to talk to them, to share information, leads, tips. So what if some are rude? That's what happened when journalists had to go knocking on doors. Some told you to Fack Off, other people gave you a cup of tea and talked for hours. That's What People Are Like.

And anyway, why would anyone working across the top of Australia's news media industry expect all who still bother to engage with them on news to be polite, concise and respectful? That's not exactly the history of the Australian news media industry itself, is it? Or the history of our news media towards the public. This relationship has been long hostile.

The ABC's Michael Rowland:

Twitter is a double-edged sword for political journalists.
It's an invaluable source of breaking news and allows us to keep track of campaign developments in real time.For good and bad, it's a forum for politicians to make unfiltered announcements or respond to criticism from the other side, all of which provides fodder for news stories and commentary. 

"Twitter is a peanut gallery of hyper-partisan tools," Chris Uhlmann laments.

Can't live with it, can't live without it, eh Chris? 

Social media doesn't demand quick action-packed interviews and breezy sound bites on policies. The news audience on social media demands all the data and background info relevant to the subject so proper fact-checking can be carried out. So the news that results, that people on Twitter are willing to put their names to in sharing, is more credible, closer to the truth, and richer with information. People who like sharing quality news aren't big fans of seeing what they shared easily debunked in comments below. Many on Twitter really do care about the quality of information that comes out of the Newsdesk bearing their name.

Now that may not be everyone on Twitter, but there's 1000s more Australians on Twitter  analysing politics and policies and checking for corruption than the entire Australian News Industry has engaged in such tasks.

Some of the political journalists entrenched in Old Media still pretend not much has changed, and that The People Who Really Matter are still spending 3 hours every morning reading through Opinion pages in The Australian and The Financial Review (when virtually no-one outside the media industry is doing anything like that now). They seem to dreamily hope people will soon get sick of this whole internet thing and return to Quality Print Media or something. A belief that remains even while that very print media industry has sacked most of their specialised journalists.

Here's former ABC now Nine-Fairfax political um correspondent Chris Uhlmann on how he deals with those smartypants people on Twitter who, perhaps, might know from their work history or life experiences more about a certain subject than he might:

'I'll post a tweet on federal politics, wait for the notifications of replies to build up on my phone home screen then bulk delete all of them without reading a single word. 

"If I spend even a minute bothered...they win. If I don't engage and they all day getting worked up about it, then I win."

This is an experienced journalist employed by a for-profit news media company explaining how he both ignores and baits his news audience, for his own amusement. He's bullshitting. He reads his own comments, every journalist checks. But Uhlmann clearly hates the debunking and fact-checks he finds.

Fark The Customers, apparently. It's a bizarre attitude, generally, for any employee of an industry losing both profits and audience in double digit percentage points almost every quarter to still hold.

Bizarre an attitude as this is that Chris Uhlmann can still harbour - blaming the news audience for caring about facts and paying attention - this clearly isn't going far enough for Murdoch Crime Family's star goon, Andrew Bolt. He can top it. But how? By hating democracy and the voters responsible for voting:

An American media company campaigning against democracy in Australia. Is that a new level?

'Don't Vote! It's Socialist!'

'Refuse Your Right To Vote!'

'Don't Be A Sheeple! Stop Voting!'

What a curious thing to see the Delaware-based News Corp company trying to guilt-trip Australians against voting in a federal election. A foreign govt, company or person interfering in politics and elections in Australia is supposed to be illegal.

Here's Michael Rowland again, reminding us how terrible it is people interested in News on social media try to engage with journalists who allegedly report News:

According to many veteran political journalists, this Twitter "feedback" is getting much more vicious.
The Courier-Mail's national affairs editor Dennis Atkins said Twitter users had certainly "amped up" over the last few weeks. 

"They are shoutier, they are more tribal. They have never been great ones for considering other points of view, but now they have lost any inclination to do that," he said.
"They are quick to attack the person rather than engage in the merits of an argument."

Dennis Atkins is a veteran Murdoch tabloids journalist listing the bad habits we likely picked up from reading or being exposed to tabloid Australian TV journalism and the Murdoch newspapers most of their lives. Atkins didn't seem aware he was describing the editorial room policies of the tabloids that employed him.

Guardian Australia's political editor Katharine Murphy notes there's often an increase in anxiety and frustration on social media in election campaigns.

She says that's consistent with the polls that tell us voters are deeply disaffected with politics and distrustful of institutions, including media organisations.

"So most of it is that, but I also think elections bring an increase in what I suspect is organised or loosely organised trolling directed against politicians and individual journalists," she said. 

"Some actors are intent on being disruptive on social platforms and picking fights as a means to that end."

Some political journalists are intent on being disruptive and picking fights. They get paid to do it. To inflame the public. Provocation-Reaction. When such journalists thoroughly stir up the public, and people snap, they are deemed "controversial" and "successful" like it's a war on the people they're winning.

Perhaps the news industry could set a better example than the audience they are reporting for? Australians have had 100 years now of vicious, abusive, cruel news media content, feasting off the miseries and tragedies of Australians lives. Isn't a century of anything long enough?

Michael Rowland:

While the hyper-partisans are alert to any perceived "bias", Uhlmann believes one side is way more offensive than the other. 

"While one of the memes of the early 21st century is the rise of the aggressive right, the emergence of what I would call the "post-Christian left" is much more of a worry," he said.

Uh huh. Uhlmann, paid to provide information to people for a living, makes up stupid new terminologies to further categorise and try and belittle his news audience, then announces his New Controversial View on TV and on social media, then wonders why people respond with "hostility" and call him a cliched boring old media hack.

But Uhlmann doesn't actually wonder anything like that. It's not a mystery to him. He knows why people respond that way. He's been trained to provoke his audience, and he clearly enjoys doing it. That's the way the Legends Of Australian Journalism did their work. The more furious the reaction from the News Target, the better the front page and headlines. When Uhlmann was a cub reporter, Serious Journalists, drunk by midday, were still picking fights with mourners at funerals for a "great photo."

Eventually, most of the remaining news audience won't bother responding to Provocation-Reaction journalists, like Uhlmann, at all. They'll tune out, and after a few weeks or months, these news customers will realise that such stock standard Old Media routines are intensely boring, and not missed at all. Not when there's so much excellent news media elsewhere in the world, and on social media, to inform and feed your head.

Maybe the better Old Media journalists will realise in time.

Murdoch Journo Calls Reading Newspapers For Free Online "Piracy"

In yet another article by a Murdoch-employed journalist pumping the coming new reality of "You Will Pay!" access restrictions on Digital Rupert 'news' stories, Terry McCrann does exactly as the headline claims :

The obvious problem is of course getting people to pay for online media and especially newspaper content. Like this one, part of Murdoch's News Corp.

A series of problems actually. The technical one -- how do you actually do it?

The, for want of a better word, piracy one -- how do you stop the content being accessed anyway, by the way that links on the internet work.

Or by the way bloggers will adapt to deal with pay walls around online news they want to "klepto".

Digital Rupert Predicts Death Of All Newspapers

Ex-Australian alleged newspaper industry visionary Rupert Murdoch now believes that only a
Kindle-like digital reader can save the newspaper business :

“If it doesn’t, newspapers will go out of business. All newspapers. There’s just not enough advertising to go around.”

All newspapers, Rupert? Or just most of yours?

The day that Australians are expected to start paying to gain access to Digital Rupert News Media seems to keep slipping deeper and deeper into 2010.

Meanwhile, NineMSN, Yahoo7, the ABC and SBS will not be charging readers to access their online news, and now Fairfax has announced it will Wait N See how disastrous the paywalls turn out to be for Digital Rupert before they make a decision.

The other huge problem that Digital Rupert doesn't mention, at least in the US, is that even while established newspapers are still online for free, eyeballs are already going elsewhere online. America's most famous newspapers, including Murdoch's New York Post, are hemorrhaging readers.

More than two out of three among the top 30 newspaper Web sites reported year-over-year declines in unique users in October according to new data from Nielsen Online.

It's not just a case of, as Murdoch claims, "there's not enough advertising to go around." There's also not enough readers, for the massive abundance of digital news, to go around. There's simply too much else to do online, or on an iPhone, than to read through the same headlines you've already seen on half a dozen other news sites, or on Twitter.

Physical newspapers are no longer essential for most people in their day to day lives. And online newspapers are becoming, likewise, less than essential for those who can access a world of free information and news already.

These are revolutionary, and revelatory, times for the established corporate news media that can now no longer control, or even majorly influence, the flow of news and information. At least, not like they could and did, only a few short years ago.

Tim Burrows (Mumbrella) : Murdoch Not Bluffing On Threat To Block Google

Murdoch Attacks Bloggers, Again, As His Empire Self-Destructs

This is from an Associated Press story, about the Associated Press boss, Tom Curley, and News Corp. boss Rupert Murdoch complaining, once again, about search engines and bloggers "stealing" their content. Interestingly, this story is hosted on Google who paid Associated Press to the use the story, and yet the Associated Press boss, Tom Curley, is angry about search engines like Google using their content without paying for it :

The leaders of two of the world's major news organizations said Friday that it is time for search engines and others who use news content for free to pay up.

The comments from Tom Curley of The Associated Press and News Corp.'s Rupert Murdoch come as the media industry struggles in the Internet age. Many news companies contend that sites such as Google have reaped a fortune from their articles, photos and video without fairly compensating the news organizations producing the material.

"We content creators have been too slow to react to the free exploitation of news by third parties without input or permission," Curley, the AP's chief executive, told a meeting of 300 media leaders in Beijing.

"Crowd-sourcing Web services such as Wikipedia, YouTube and Facebook have become preferred customer destinations for breaking news, displacing Web sites of traditional news publishers," Curley said. "We content creators must quickly and decisively act to take back control of our content."

He said content aggregators, such as search engines and bloggers, were also directing audiences and revenue away from content creators.

"We will no longer tolerate the disconnect between people who devote themselves — at great human and economic cost — to gathering news of public interest and those who profit from it without supporting it," Curley said.

Murdoch also told the opening session of the World Media Summit in Beijing's Great Hall of the People that content providers would be demanding to be paid.

"The aggregators and plagiarists will soon have to pay a price for the co-opting of our content. But if we do not take advantage of the current movement toward paid content, it will be the content creators — the people in this hall — who will pay the ultimate price and the content kleptomaniacs who triumph," the News Corp. chief executive said.

The AP and its member newspapers contend that unauthorized use of their material is costing them tens of millions of dollars in potential advertising revenue at a time when they can least afford it.

The AP's revenue is expected to be around $700 million this year, down from $748 million in 2008, in part because of reductions in the fees it charges newspapers and broadcasters, whose advertising revenue has been dwindling as more marketers shift to less expensive or better-targeted options online.

Murdoch and Curley were speaking to 300 representatives from more than 170 media outlets from 80 countries at a meeting that will look at the challenges and opportunities the media face from the Internet, changes in technology and the world economic crisis.

It'll be interesting to visit this story again in three or four years and see what's happened.

Murdoch Media Reports Murdoch Media Plans Won't Work



It was there on the front page of Rupert Murdoch's news.com.au for a few hours, then it was gone. A story featuring Google CEO, Eric Schmidt, explaining why Murdoch's plans to charge people to read digital news is doomed to fail :

Publishers of general news will find it hard to charge for their content online because too much free content is available, (Eric Schmidt) the chief executive of Google says.

Mr Schmidt was responding to an announcement by News Corporation chairman and CEO Rupert Murdoch that he could start charging for content online.

"In general these models have not worked for general public consumption because there are enough free sources that the marginal value of paying is not justified based on the incremental value of quantity," he said.

The story was open for comments, all of whom agreed with Schmidt. One example :

Gone are the days of people getting all of their news from the one source. People get their news from a variety of sources now. There is absolutely no reason to confine oneself to a singular edition of news on a single web site. I wonder why Murdoch doesn't understand this?

No doubt the automated publication of that news wire story on news.com.au must have caused a few palpitations.

Murdoch Celebrates Death Of Newspapers : "It's Going To Be Great"

By Darryl Mason

It's not just smirking bloggers and feisty independent New Media snarking over the Death Of Newspapers. Now Rupert Murdoch, who convinced a generation of British fathers in the 1970s and 1980s that they should be proud to see their 18 year old daughter's tits on Page 3 of The Sun, is joining in the newsprint grave dancing :

"I do certainly see the day when more people will be buying their newspapers on portable reading panels than on crushed trees.

“Then we’re going to have no paper, no printing plants, no unions. It’s going to be great.”

But the monopoly of distribution and political influence he once enjoyed, and exploited, with newspapers is gone forever. Now Murdoch's news has to compete in the ultimate free market, as he tries to force readers to pay for news that they will (soon after it breaks) also be able to find elsewhere on the internet for free.

Murdoch has also announced plans to increase prices for the cable sports programming he controls. He believes News Corp. has been “undercharging". Australian subscribers to premium Fox Sports channels will be surprised to hear that.

The first example of how Murdoch's YouWillPay! system will work, as far as news and opinion content is concerned, comes with the announcement that :

The Wall Street Journal...will start charging non-subscribers $2 a week to access content on mobile devices such as the BlackBerry, he said. Current subscribers will be charged $1.

So even if you already pay a few hundred dollars a year, or more, to access The Wall Street Journal, Murdoch's going to hit you up for another $52 a years minimum to read it all on your hand screen.

The headline on this Financial Times story reads :

Murdoch Hails E-Readers

Like he has a choice now.

Malcolm Turnbull On Death Of Newspapers

Turnbull writing on the fall of newspapers, and the controversy over mainstream media charging readers for news content, in The National Times :

It was Rupert Murdoch who shrewdly, if gloomily, predicted: "The internet will destroy more profitable businesses than it will create."

And there are few businesses more vulnerable to the internet than newspapers, especially those dependent on revenues from classified advertisements.

It is hard to imagine many people poring through hard copy classifieds if they have access, as most do, to the speed, functionality and comprehensiveness of online classified sites.

While the demise of newspapers has been greatly exaggerated, the trend is certainly against them.

As an avid consumer of news, I can say that I only buy hard copy newspapers nowadays out of habit.

The vast bulk of the news and opinion I read I have received electronically – much of it before the newspaper itself actually finds itself to my front door.

We all understand that the circulation revenue of most publications, and certainly all newspapers, was always woefully inadequate. The newspaper was a cheap, on occasions free, platform upon which to sell advertisements both display and classified.

A similar observation could be made of free to air television, although there the oligopoly was a function of regulation.

The internet has changed all that. As broadband, especially wireless broadband, becomes more and more ubiquitous the barriers to entry to compete against free to air television, newspapers and magazines are evaporating.

From the consumer's viewpoint there is the prospect of almost infinite abundance of information and opinion. Our son in Hong Kong reads the Australian media online with the same ease as he, and we, are able to read the New York Times, the Financial Times, Wall Street Journal - not to speak of the South China Morning Post.

And the access to opinion is not limited to those big names. Increasingly opinion leaders have their own online blogs. If you want to get an expert, often contrarian, insight into the Chinese economy for example you can go to www.mpettis.com a specialist blog by a professor at Peking University and enjoy not just Michael Pettis' views but also a vigorous debate and commentary on every post.

The days when only a handful of media companies controlled access to the media megaphone are fading from view.

There are four main players in this game and it is interesting to consider each of their positions in the old and new worlds.

The author of the content – the journalist for example – faces the challenge of news organisations with diminishing revenues. But he or she still has a valuable and important contribution to offer. People want to read Annabel Crabb or listen to Alan Jones. But what about the humble news reporter whose byline is less memorable or compelling? The advertiser has it made. The avenues for spruiking their wares gets wider and cheaper all the time. The internet offers the opportunity of very precise targeting too – so its all upside for the advertiser.

The consumer too has it made – content is becoming more and more diverse and almost all of it is free. Those sites which try to charge big money run the risk that they drive down traffic which then reduces their attractiveness to advertisers who after all are only interested in eyeballs.

The publisher, the big, established media company, has the most to lose. It is all downside. The reason the Sydney Morning Herald could charge a premium for its classifieds (or indeed its display advertising) was because it had a large number of dedicated readers for whom there was no, or very few, alternative mediums – now there is an enormous range of alternatives most of them offering vastly superior functionality.

Many traditional hard copy publishers have sought to move into online publishing, but in doing so they have arguably only hastened their own demise. Because they assumed the hard copy publication was paying for the content, the marginal cost of repurposing it for the internet was negligible. Hence access to online newspaper websites is almost invariably free. They therefore offered advertisers the opportunity to access the readers who were interested in the content offered in hard copy for a tiny fraction of the price of an advertisement in the newspaper itself.

And you can see this decline in the share price of Fairfax. When the Tourang consortium took over Fairfax in 1992 the shares listed at $1.20. Today – seventeen years later – the stock price is $1.64.

So who wins out of all this? Certainly the advertisers and the consumers, that's a no brainer.

The established newspaper companies will struggle to build enough additional value in their online businesses to offset the loss of value in their declining hard copy businesses.

But what about the writers and journalists? Are they to face an anarchic brave new world where they have to try to sell their wares on line as Alan Kohler and Bob Gottliebsen are trying to do?

And what happens to investigative journalism?

Opinion is relatively cheap to acquire or produce. But who now can pay for a team of reporters to work diligently away at government or corporate misconduct?

This era of profitless abundance should give us cause for concern – it raises real issues for our democracy. Will newsrooms deprived of the resources to do their own sleuthing become more and more dependent on packages of information prepared and presented to them by the growing army of government media advisers and spinmeisters?

How independent can the media be if it lacks the financial resources to do its work?

Good question.

The answer will become clear over the next two years.

James Murdoch : Our Bananas Are Doomed

Forget about the looming immolation of the worldwide Murdoch media empire, James Murdoch has some stunning news about bananas :

"Witness the international banana market. In the 1950s the banana export industry faced a problem: the then dominant Gros Michel – or ‘Big Mike’ - variety was being wiped out by a fungus called Panama Disease. The industry took the decision to replace the entire world export crop with a supposedly disease-resistant variety called the Cavendish banana – the one we eat today. Unfortunately it now appears that these bananas may themselves be vulnerable to a different kind of Panama Disease. Since Cavendish bananas are genetically identical sterile clones, they cannot build up any resistance."

Wait, we're going to lose all bananas? Why didn't I read about that in The Australian? I might have even paid for it.

James Murdoch used the example of doomed bananas to illustrate some difficult parallels he tries to draw between Darwinism and the free market. You can read the speech here. It's actually chock full of first class conspiracy theories and bizarre proclamations about how you can only have free speech if people are forced to pay for the news. Something like that. You try and make sense of it.

On any scale of rankings for Paranoid & Desperate Ramblings, it's right out there. Then again, you must remember that James, like his dad, Rupert, is now facing severe pressure from shareholders about why they should both be collecting eight figure salaries when hundreds of Murdoch journalists and sub-editors will be canned across the US, the UK and Australia, in the next few months.

Two decades ago, Rupert Murdoch made the following prediction in a speech :

....television sets would be “linked by fibre-optic cable to a global cornucopia of programming and nearly infinite libraries of data, education and entertainment”....

So Murdoch knew what was coming, but didn't prepare for it. He didn't understand, back then, and only really gets it now, that that the rise of Free Information would mean the loss of monopoly, of control, of vast profits, of influence and relevancy.

As Rupert Murdoch himself said back in 1989 :

"If someone goes bust, too bad."

Exactly.

James Murdoch : Free News Is Anti-Free Speech

Now I may be misquoting James Murdoch to some extent by attributing the above words to him, but it certainly seems to be what he is saying in this remarkably whiney speech, as the worldwide Murdoch media empire loses billions and faces ruin. This is how the Murdoch-owned TimesOnline reported the story:

An out-of-control BBC and addiction to central planning by regulators are damaging democracy and media choice in Britain, James Murdoch said in Edinburgh last night.

Giving the annual MacTaggart lecture to an audience of television executives, Mr Murdoch, 36, the son of Rupert Murdoch, called for a “dramatic reduction of the activities of the State” in broadcasting, arguing that it effectively treated viewers like children.

He contrasted the prevailing political attitude to mainstream broadcasting with the lightly regulated newspaper, film or book industry where consumer choice predominates.

Mr Murdoch, chief executive of the European and Asian operations of News Corporation, parent company of The Times, said: “In the regulated world of public service broadcasting, the customer does not exist: he or she is a passive creature — a viewer in need of protection.

“In other parts of the media world, including pay television and newspapers, the customer is just that: someone whose very freedom to choose makes them important.”

He said that the “chilling” expansionism of the BBC meant that commercial rivals and consumer choice were struggling. In particular the “expansion of state-sponsored journalism” in the form of BBC News online was “a threat to plurality and the independence of news provision, which are so important to our democracy”.

Mr Murdoch criticised Radio 2’s effort to woo younger listeners by hiring presenters such as Jonathan Ross on “salaries no commercial competitor could afford”.

“No doubt the BBC celebrates the fact that it now has well over half of all radio listening. But the consequent impoverishment of the once-successful commercial sector is testament to the corporation’s inability to distinguish between what is good for it and what is good for the country.”

Mr Murdoch’s lecture comes 20 years after his father, the chief executive of News Corp, made a wide-ranging attack on the BBC and the British television establishment. However, this speech fell short of calling for specific cutbacks to the BBC or other changes in broadcasting policy, so as to concentrate on first principles.

He said: “The consensus appears to be that creationism — the belief in a managed process with an omniscient authority — is the only way to achieve successful outcomes. There is general agreement that the natural operation of the market is inadequate, and that a better outcome can be achieved through the wisdom and activity of governments and regulators. This creationist approach is similiar to the industrial planning which went out of fashion in other sectors in the 1970s. It failed then. It’s failing now.”

Defending the BBC, Sir Michael Lyons, the Chairman of the BBC Trust, said that its licence fee funding system meant that it “has no choice but to serve all audiences, but that doesn’t meant that it can or should seek to squeeze out other providers”.

He added: “We have to be careful not to reduce the whole of broadcasting to some simple economic transactions. The BBC’s public purposes stress the importance of the well-tested principles of educating and informing, and an impartial contribution to debate.”

Ofcom, the communications regulator, was criticised by Mr Murdoch for intervening “with relish” whenever it had the opportunity and producing adjudications on what broadcasters “can and cannot say” amounting to “roughly half a million words” long. Its activities included “the no doubt vital guide on ‘How to Download,’ which teenagers across the land could barely have survived without”.

He stopped short of calling for the abolition of Ofcom but said that its activities needed to be reduced “to contemplate intervention only on the evidence of actual and serious harm to the interests of consumers”.

Mr Murdoch, who is also the chief executive of BSkyB, 39.1 per cent owned by News Corp, made clear that he believed that broadcasters such as Sky should be freed from the long-standing requirement to produce impartial news.

He argued that “the mere selection of stories and their place in the running order is itself a process full of unacknowledged partiality”. The impartiality rule was “an impingement on the freedom of speech”.

Ofcom said that it welcomed Mr Murdoch’s contribution. It was “committed to its duty to protect consumers’ and viewers’ interests and to promote competition and innovation based on thorough and objective evidence and analysis”.

For some contrast, this is how the BBC reported the James Murdoch speech attacking the BBC :

News Corporation's James Murdoch has said that a "dominant" BBC threatens independent journalism in the UK.

The chairman of the media giant in Europe, which owns the Times and Sun, also blamed the UK government for regulating the media "with relish".

"The expansion of state-sponsored journalism is a threat to the plurality and independence of news provision," Mr Murdoch said.

He was giving the MacTaggart lecture at the Edinburgh Television Festival.

Mr Murdoch said that organisations like the BBC, funded by the licence fee, as well as Channel 4 and Ofcom made it harder for other broadcasters to survive.

"The BBC is dominant," Mr Murdoch said. "Other organisations might rise and fall but the BBC's income is guaranteed and growing."

"The scope of its activities and ambitions is chilling."

News Corporation, which owns Sky television, lost $3.4bn (£2bn) in the year to the end of June, which his father, News Corporation boss Rupert Murdoch, said had been "the most difficult in recent history".

Other media organisations are also struggling as advertising revenues have dropped during the downturn.

Sir Michael Lyons, chairman of the BBC Trust, told BBC's World Tonight that Mr Murdoch had underplayed the importance of Sky as a competitor.

"Sky continues to grow and get stronger and stronger all the time so this is not quite a set of minnows and a great big BBC," Sir Michael said.

"The BBC has a very strong competitor in Sky, and not one to be ignored."

Mr Murdoch said free news on the web provided by the BBC made it "incredibly difficult" for private news organisations to ask people to pay for their news.

"It is essential for the future of independent digital journalism that a fair price can be charged for news to people who value it," he said.

News Corporation has said it will start charging online customers for news content across all its websites.

It owns the Times, the Sunday Times and Sun newspapers and pay TV provider BSkyB in the UK and the New York Post and Wall Street Journal in the US.

Rupert Murdoch addressed the same festival 20 years ago, and criticised the UK's media policy then as well.

Unfortunately for the Murdoch empire, now crying "Unfair!", the vast majority of Brits, like the vast majority of Australians, are very happy, and very satisfied, with their taxpayer funded broadcasters.

The Fairfax/Murdoch Merger Grows Nearer

It doesn't sound like it would be legal, but they're open to discussing it anyway :

Fairfax Media managing director Brian McCarthy said he would be "happy to talk" to rival News Corp about charging readers for online news content.

Mr McCarthy's comments came after Fairfax posted a net loss of $380 million for the year to June 30, due to a downturn in advertising and writedowns forced by the financial crisis.

"We're looking at all the options and if that's one of the options we'll look at it," Mr McCarthy said on a teleconference on Monday.

Rupert Murdoch, chairman and chief executive of News Corp, said in August his global media group would start charging for access to online news content this financial year to combat falling advertising revenue.

Mr McCarthy said if News Ltd chairman and chief executive John Hartigan were to ring him: "I'd have a chat and we'd look at it".

"It certainly would be something we'd be open minded to at this stage."

Mr McCarthy remembers the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission :

"There is a group called the ACCC and whatever we do, we have to make sure we're doing it within the law.

"Putting that to one side, as I said I'd be happy to talk to anybody about any suggestions."

The Los Angeles Times reported on its website on Friday that News Corp's chief digital officer Jonathan Miller had met with executives from the New York Times, Washington Post, Hearst Corp and Tribune Company to discuss the formation of a consortium to charge for online news content.

The Murdoch and Fairfax media already both fund and share the content of the Australian Associated Press news agency.

Who Just Lost Another Few Billion Trying To Convince You That Celebrities Are Important And That People Who Don't Look Like You Can't Be Trusted?

Witnessing The Death Throes Of An Old Media Dinosaur

By Darryl Mason

A short round-up of the global losses of the Rupert Murdoch media empire, culled from this story :

* News Corporation net loss in 12 months - $US3.4 billion.

* Full year operating profit drops by 32%

* Growth in cable TV fails to compensate for massive losses in films, books, magazines, newspapers.

* In April/May/June quarter 2009, News Corp. smashed by $203 million in losses. In comparison, same quarter 2008 saw $1.1 billion profit.

* Advertising revenue for Murdoch's British papers - The Sun, The Times, News Of The World - plunged by 14%.

* Murdoch's 20th Century Fox film division, profits slumped from $1.24 last year to $848 million this year.

* Profits from Murdoch's Fox TV division - US, UK, Asia - were slashed by more than 80%.

No wonder ex-Australian Rupert Murdoch was reading, grimly, by phone, from a prepared statement when he tried to explain to shareholders that while the news about News Corp. was shockingly bad, next year was looking better because he intended to make people....umm....pay to read the news online.

Pay to read the news online? Who didn't laugh when they heard that the first time? This is a visionary strategy to save a massive global corporation from destruction?

Who is this crazy old man and what has he done with the Dirty Digger?

Stephen Mayne, the founder of the profitable online news site, Crikey, was interviewed on ABC Midday News on Thursday, as news broke of the ex-Australian's media empire being blitzed by billions in losses.

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"The problem Rupert has got is that he is in the dinosaur industry of newspapers"

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Mayne doesn't necessarily think that the ex-Australian will be left completely fucked and bombed by the 'You Will Pay!' experiment, but it's not looking good. Mayne believes the Murdoch product soon to be for sale is not good enough, and Murdoch will always be ten steps from disaster as long as he continues printing actual newspapers.

"I think for Rupert Murdoch to declare that the Herald Sun, the Daily Telegraph, every one of his newspapers in the world, and he is the world's biggest newspaper owner, for them all to charge is a very risky proposition," Mayne said. "And I predict they won't get much revenue, and they'll simply lose a whole heap of (reader) traffic."

Mayne said Murdoch's biggest problem was not simply convincing people to read Pay To Read online, but to give them enough reasons to want to pay.

"A lot of what Rupert does isn't particularly high quality, and if there's other high quality material from Fairfax, or other rivals in Britain and the US, that is still free, then everyone will just go to their websites. So you can only charge if (all the other news media) is charging and if your content is particularly fantastic," Mayne said.

"So the big challenge for Rupert, is to round up all the big newspaper publishers around the world and to get them to all collude and agree to change the business model. And that will be very hard given they all compete so aggressively."

The ex-Australian will continue to suffer while he clings to the 20th century.

"The problem Rupert has got is that he is in the dinosaur industry of newspapers," Mayne said.

"The industry is collapsing, his advertising revenue is down 20% across the board. Google has cut everybody's lunch. And i think the only real way he can get out of it is to get companies like Google to start paying him money in return for aggregating their content. Get everyone together, start charging, and then do a big deal with Google to try and scoop up some of their billions in annual advertising revenue derived from aggregating newspaper content."

Doing away with actual newspapers, Mayne predicts, will be an inevitable part of returning Big Media to shareholder-applauding profit. That is, if profits enough to survive are even possible again for a corporation as large and expensive and bloated with seven figure executives as Murdoch's News Corp.

"I think newspapers...it's a dying industry," Mayne said.

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"Publishers have been screwing advertisers for 100 years. Technology has now turned the tables"

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Economist Alan Kholer says Rupert Murdoch is crashing and burning because advertising income online compared to print has proved to be so gaping :

....who was to know that the price of online advertising would settle at about a tenth of the price of print advertising?

This is, after all, a classic business event: a technological change that causes a price reduction. And the result is always the same - lower costs.

While absurdly high print advertising prices (in print) have subsidised large editorial budgets, and low or zero cover prices, it won’t do it online.

It is the fact that the price of advertising has collapsed. Murdoch’s real problem is that the balance of power between publishers and advertisers has entirely flipped.

Advertisers and their agencies now rule the roost. They refuse to pay more than a tenth or so per unit of what they pay in print, and they demand much better service, such as only paying for actual new customers, not simply for “branding” that can’t be measured.

And why shouldn’t they act this way? The publishers have been screwing them for a hundred years, charging outrageous prices to access their treasured audiences. Technology has now turned the tables.

We are merely witnessing the death throes of an oligopoly’s hubris.

An editorial in Crikey ouchingly brands the newspapers Murdoch clings to as "legacy media" :

"...this is all a gigantic gamble by desperate newspaper owners to plug the deep cracks in their business models that have turned newspapers from 20th century money machines into 21st century legacy media.

Saying that quality journalism is not cheap to produce is self-evident. But the fundamental problem for most quality newspapers is not that people aren’t paying for that journalism, it’s that advertisers — especially classified advertisers — have found a better and cheaper medium than newspapers. And it’s the advertisers, not the readers, who pay for the quality journalism that made newspapers so profitable and powerful.

Unless readers are prepared to replace the lost classified advertising revenues — which in the case of a newspaper like The Sydney Morning Herald would require every buyer to pay something like $250 a year extra for the content — the problem of funding quality journalism won’t be solved.

I've been a newspaper junkie since my early teens. I brought 2 or 3 newpapers a day, every day, for decades, until about 3 years ago. Now I only regularly buy weekend newspapers.

I spent about $10 on newspapers last weekend, and except for a Louis Nowra piece in The Australian, most of the weekend paper pile remains unread. I read most of the news elsewhere online, the day before. I can barely bother to read columnists like Greg Sheridan, Philip Adams, Miranda Devine and Sun Herald, Sunday Telegraph and The Australians editorials, online, let alone devoting offline time to getting through them.

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It seems an unimaginable reality. What do you mean they don't print newspapers anymore?

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None of the weekend papers feel essential anymore. It doesn't feel like I'm going to miss out if I don't buy them and read them comprehensively. When I was in my early 20s, I often chose buying newspapers over buying Saturday morning breakfast. The idea of doing that now seems insane.

There are probably thousands of bloggers, and dozens of indie media sites, run by juiced New Media 20-somethings, who snort and cackle and giggle with delight at what is happening to the old corporate media these days, and some seem to take a particular delight in believing that actual newspapers won't be found some day soon in racks at the 7-11, or piling up the gutters on windy days.

It's seems an unimaginable reality. What do you mean they don't print newspapers anymore?


You had to wait for the newspaper once. You had to wait for it to go on sale, or for the newsagent to open. There was many a 2am Saturday or Sunday morning when I haunted all night newsagents in Kings Cross or Central Station (coming home from work, or from seeing gigs) hassling to get bundles cut open so I could get what I wanted and rush home to read them before sleep overwhelmed.

Now I can just read all that vital news on an iPhone as I stumble home instead.

And if there are days when I can't be bothered to visit online news sites, let alone pick up an actual paper, I'm confident that the array of writers, journos, media junkies, I follow on Twitter will alert me to plenty of quality news from all over the world, including much that I would never bothered to read had they not recommended it.

And Twitter is the nail through the palms of all the big, vastly expensive news media online today. Murdoch execs in particular still seem to have no idea what this instant news sharing system is going to become. None of them dare to say the word 'Twitter' out loud right now, even as they loudly repeatedly denounce the legitimate competition for eyeballs and attention from one person blogs, as they attempt to degrade and discredit the credibility of a thrilling storm of independent New News Media.

"You need us to tell you what's going on."

Really? Do we?

It doesn't feel like that anymore.

All media execs are terrified of Twitter. Trying to fit a chunk of news or info into just 140 character posts is is training millions how to write clearly, succinctly. Twitter is training people in how to reduce an explanation of what is happening to them, or people they know, or people they've just read about, into a handful of words. Experienced twooters can compress a 1200 word front page story in The Australian to its most essential facts spread across a couple of posts.

If you want to know the latest news on anything, tossing subject key words into the Twitter search engine more often than not delivers you the very latest on the news you're interested in, sometimes literally a minute or less after it happens.

The idea that the average person needs a journalist, or a columnist, to explain to them what is happening in their local community, their city or state, their country, to interpret and filter information, feels very 20th century.

As 20th century as that file pile of weekend newspapers a few feet from me, that now feel like more of a chore than a pleasure to leaf through.

I live without daily newspapers now, and I'm sure I've almost been rehabbed enough by a world of online news to dump the weekend newspaper habit as well.

If the Old Media now so desperately trying to save itself from financial ruin and irrelevancy can't convince a full-blown news junkie like me to buy their gear in print or online, what hope do they have to convince the majority who have only a casual news habit?

I feel absolutely no devotion or allegiance to any Old Media. What do they serve up that I can't get elsewhere online, if not immediately, then a bit later from elsewhere?

I'd rather pay Fairfax columnist Annabel Crabbe $30 a year to write her columns for her own blog and then alert me to those stories via Twitter than to pay Fairfax $100 or more a year for a whole slew of content I don't want, don't need, won't read. If Crabbe charged, say, $60 a year and mailed me a book she'd either written or one she highly recommended, I'd sign up tomorrow.

To me, the biggest problem the Old Media in Australia, all over the world, face right now is overcoming the dawning reality that they are no longer essential.

The monopoly on information and news enjoyed for so long by a handful of media corporations has been smashed by the Big Free, by thousands of blogs and independent news sites and comment boards on MySpace and on aggregators (and summarisers) like Digg and Reddit and free access forums on anything you can imagine, contemplate or question.

Information and news is Free, and that cannot be changed back now. No matter what former gods of public manipulation and opinion shaping like Rupert Murdoch try and do, the sharing of news and information can never go back to what it once was.

Those days are over.

Curiously, while the media giants are being stripped by market forces of their wealth and influence, there are plenty of blogs and independent news media who are doing very well for themselves right now, and free information exchangeries like Twitter only help to expand their online audiences.

When the true desperation sets in for media giants like Murdoch, and it wont be long now, the real down and nasty war against all that enthusiastically free competition from bloggers and indie news sites will begin. And it will be an ugly.

And pathetic.


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The Orstrahyun Hails The Murdoch 'Death To Free Information' Movement

By Darryl Mason

Rupert Murdoch's News.com.au 'heralds' the end of Free News. Yeah, go away free information. How we hate you.




I'm as reluctant as The Professional Idiot and Tim "Immeasurable Hurt" Blair are to announce that soon you will have to pay to read this blog.

But you will.

I'm sorry, but days of Free Information are gone now.

Wake up to yourself. You know it's true. Rupert said so. Yes, he lost a couple of billion dollars, but so what? He's the Sun King.

Like Rupert's 'quality journalism', you will soon have to pay to read this blog.

Or I will no longer be able to bring infrequently posted, vaguely coherent, content before your eyeballs.

It's that simple.

So here's how The Orstrahyun 'You Will Pay!' business model will work :

1) I will data-mine any and all personal information I can find out about you, then I'll find out where you live.

2) I will turn up at your front door expecting a decent dinner (no vegan shit) at least twice a year. "My family's asleep" and "who the fuck are you?" will not be acceptable excuses for non-honourance of our verbital food-for-blog-stuff contract.

3) After dinner, you will only be allowed to show me holiday photos of places I haven't been, and you will accept that I can shout "Oh, Boring!" whenever I want to.

4) You will have to supply drinks before and after the dinner. You don't have to come on all flash. This is not a shakedown. Woodstock Bourbon & Cola in a can is fine, but if you're rich, you will be expected to break out the Wild Turkey Special Blend.

Death to Free News (And Blogs)!


And don't miss this. The Inquisitr has an hilarious story where a media buyer claims Murdoch is preparing to sue Google and Yahoo because their search engines drive traffic to Murdoch media sites. The bastards!


UPDATE : Only hours after Rupert Murdoch announces he wants to have a go at foolishly attempting to destroy the link-based free-sharing New Media culture by locking his content behind pay walls, Reuters announces that not only do they want independent bloggers, like me, to link to their news stories, they are also happy for bloggers to excerpt their news stories and build new content from it. As long as we all play fair.

Of course, compared to the bloated executive excesses of Murdoch's News, Reuters is a lean and mean operation. But they aren't taking a chance by encouraging bloggers to link to and share their content. They don't have a choice. Murdoch thinks he can still Own The News. He becomes more like Mister Burns every year.

Rupert Murdoch still doesn't get it. Reuters gets it.

So on day one of the New Murdoch 'You Will Pay!' Digital Media Reality, the legend of 20th century Old Media goes and gets trumped by Reuters, who clearly understand the way it has to be.

What a monumental fuckarama the rollout of Murdoch's 'You Will Pay!' new media devolution promises to be. It's a shame so many Australian employees will lose their jobs as the awful reality of Murdoch mega fail sinks in.

UPDATE : Success! My 'You Must Pay!' proposal to readers of The Ostrahyun is already showing results only a few hours after launching. I've now received twelve invitations to dinner via comments, Twitter (@darrylmason) and e-mail, in Sydney, Brisbane, Wyong, Adelaide, Cronulla, Melbourne, Baja California, Boston and Exeter, England. There was, however, a general reluctance to supply bourbon with the meals, but regardless....

I was wrong. The 'You Must Pay' system clearly works. Go for it, Rupert!


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John Laws : "I'll Be Back (Please?)"

John Laws, fresh from his disastrous self-demolition on Melbourne radio, eyes a return to the airwaves, reports Mumbrella :

“I miss it all quite a lot. I would be telling a lie if I said I did not miss it because I do, particularly when there are issues that I would like to be involved in and make mischief.

“If somebody asked me at the right time I would probably do it because I do miss it. And I miss it when there are things going on that I think need an irreverent look.”

Laws also revealed that he still speaks to some of his regular callers, on the phone, at home. So why doesn't he record the calls and podcast them? Or simply live stream them? There's has to be a few thousand Australians who'd tune into Laws online. He could do a live broadcast over the net straight into every nursing home who'd broadcast him.

Unless he only wants to make his return for the dollars. But it doesn't sound like that. Laws sounds downright lonely, and utterly aware of his irrelevancy.

John Laws also thinks Kyle Sandilands is "annoying", "devoid of talent" and "stupid."

Remember Laws' reaction to being called an "idiot" by Neil Mitchell?

Mumbrella has more.

Real Journalists, Not Bloggers, Break The Big, Important Stories...Particularly Those Big Stories About Other Journalists

Murdoch Spying Scandal Erupts, Thousands Had Phones Hacked, Millions Paid Out To Hush It All Up

By Darryl Mason

I got a bit carried away last weekend bagging out ex-Australian Rupert Murdoch's News Limited chairman, John Hartigan, for his attack on bloggers, and independent online news media.

John Hartigan said that bloggers and independent news sites, like Crikey and Mumbrella, can't really compete with the Old Media because they can't afford to pay investigative journalists to break the stories that matter :

Our job is to tell many people what few people know. That takes lots of resources – newsrooms of two and three hundred people. If we can’t afford them, important stories won’t get told.

It might mean that those in power and those with influence can avoid the scrutiny and accountability that keeps them in check.

Hartigan cited the recent UK MP Expenses Scandal as a big story that could only be properly uncovered and investigated by paid journalists working for a professional news operation.

John Hartigan is 100% right. We do need well-paid professional journalists to break the big stories that keep the powerful in check and to hold "those with influence" to account.

After all, look at the amazing, huge, monumental story that the professional investigative journalist Nick Davies, working for the UK Guardian, has uncovered (excerpts) :

What we've uncovered is systematic activity by Rupert Murdoch's journalists....using illegal techniques of one kind or another to uncover information.

One bunch of illegal techniques is to do with using private investigators to do what's called "blagging" - that's conning their way into confidential databases, things like your bank statements, credit card statements, itemised telephone bills, tax records, all that kind of stuff.

That's all illegal and they've been doing it. And the second kind of illegal activity is using private investigators to do what's called "phone hacking", which just means that they can get into other people's mobile telephone networks and hear messages which have been left on the target's mobile phone.

....there was clear evidence of News of the World journalists, including a middle ranking executive, handling the raw material that was coming through from these intercepts.

....my understanding is that that paperwork shows us that the News of the World were hacking the phones of 2,000 or 3,000 public figures of one kind or another.

(the police) didn't pursue charges against the Murdoch journalists. And I don't know the answers to these questions, but it raises the worrying possibility....that the police at New Scotland Yard didn't want to get into a fight with powerful Rupert Murdoch...he's politically very powerful.

.....you begin to get this alarming picture of the newspaper groups drifting beyond the reach of the law because they're just too powerful.

The above quotes from Nick Davies are from an interview by Mark Colvin, of ABC's PM. You can listen to the interview here (full transcript as well). Davies is very excited, because he knows just how big this story is going to become. Already has become.

In a particularly bad piece of news for Rupert Murdoch, the story has already been picked up by the financial media, who are reporting that police are now investigating his journalists in the UK.

While that kind of news grabbing headlines in the financial media might seem bad enough, there are Wall Street brokers right now trying to find out the exact size of the payouts Murdoch's UK tabloids have already been forced to hand over to only a few victims of this corrupt, rotten-to-the-core corporate spying scandal.

The figure for payouts to victims, so far, is a couple of million in total, meaning some received at least a few hundred thousand dollars to shut the fuck up and go away. A few million already paid out to a few victims. But brokers will be touting up what this scandal may ultimately cost Murdoch if all the 2000 to 3000 victims of his journalists' hacking and spying all decide to sue for payouts at least the size of those already awarded in out of court settlements.

What figure are those brokers and stock analysts coming up with? $US800 million? $US1 billion? More?

Below is a screen grab of how Rupert Murdoch's Australian media portal, news.com.au, first ran with the story, yesterday. It'll be interesting to see how Murdoch's Australian journos cover this story as it continues to unfold. This scandal will, and should, shake the Murdoch empire to its core, particularly since Rupert Murdoch himself has denied knowing anything about the millions already paid out to victims of this corrupt, outrageous spying scandal :



Like most of the bloggers so despised by John Hartigan, I sure can't afford to hire private investigators to hack into the phones of thousands of people and supply me with transcripts of their private lives so I can provide all of you with 'Breaking News' and 'Exclusives' of the kind that some Murdoch journalists are able to come up with.

So yeah, Hartigan was right, and I was wrong. Independent bloggers can't compete with the kind of journalists that Murdoch likes to employ, because we sure as fuck don't have the dollars to compile files of the private conversations and personal messages and financial details of thousands of people.

Then again, who would want to compete, or even be compared to, corrupt, intelligence gathering scumbags like that?

The Old Media Eats Itself Alive

NOTE : This story will get a whole lot more interesting, devastatingly so, if it turns out that Rupert Murdoch himself was being fed details of what was uncovered in all that hacking and surveillance by his journalists, considering one of those many thousands being spied upon was then UK deputy prime minister John Prescott.


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Murdoch Media Jumps The Bullshit Shark In Michael Jackson Cash-In Frenzy

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.

Quality will be defined as content that is original, useful, unavailable elsewhere and relevant.

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 :



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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