The problem with Rupert Murdoch’s proposal to create an online news consortium, in which major publishers would all band together to put their news content behind pay walls (L.A. Times, 8/21/09), is that it’s not illegal to discuss news events online. And you don’t want to make it illegal to discuss news events online.
And yet, absent a law forbidding such discussions, there’s nothing to stop someone from buying subscriptions to the various pay news sites and starting a website (like this one, but more so) in which they write about what they’ve learned from them—thus offering for free what the Murdoch’s news trust would be trying to get people to pay for. You can’t copyright facts, and any attempt to change the law to allow publishers to do so would run straight into the shoals of the First Amendment and the concept of democracy itself.
Let’s say you could keep the “tech tapeworms in the intestines of the Internet” (as a Murdoch editor memorably calls them) from passing along the news for free. According to the L.A. Times piece, News Corp points to the Wall Street Journal as a success story with its website’s 1 million paying customers, and has encouraged the New York Times Co., Washington Post Co., Hearst Corp. and Tribune Co. to follow its lead. Imagine that each of those publishers was as successful, and that the paying readers they attracted did not significantly overlap (both rather unrealistic assumptions, it strikes me)—that would be great news for publishers but something of a disaster for democracy, with the news generated by these leading (and not-so-leading) outlets confined to an elite audience of 5 million—or roughly 1–2 percent of the citizenry.
It’s not like we have a particularly well-informed electorate as it is; if Murdoch’s plan for an online news cartel is at all successful, though, today’s voters may seem like Encyclopedia Brown.
Kinda funny that y’all still mistake the CorpoRats of harboring any remnant, or vestigial, ‘democratic’ sympathies.
Anything that’s a “bug” for us, the people, is an app for Murdoch and the CorpoRats.
The Corporat State is investing BILLIONS in discovering ways to silence democratic discourse the web.
It would seem to me that Murdoch’s business plan has another and far bigger error and that is his overreaching desire to shape and form the news his organization reports. How many would pay for Pravda if it went on sale? I have virtually eliminated Murdoch’s empire from my bookmarks and have felt little to no impact (I sort of miss laughs that come with the talking heads).
Herb
This is a Nation of Confusion and Mis-placed Priorites
its Divided we Stand For A Divided States OF America:
We can thank the republicans for that ever since JFK days,and thats when corporaite America took over the nation to infected this nation with Boot-licking-Lackeys offspring â┚¬“ like right-wing republicans : They control Insurance industry ;food ; health care; manufacturing , the media even the national-agenda,such as war and the type of cars we should drive: Do you think those clowns who shout at the meetings are inteligent enough to spear a nation-wide campane and just by chance a national Tv crew show up ??
There is a deep division in America or a pralysis of individual-thinking ,reguardless if the Republicans or the news media aggree or notâ┚¬Ã‚¦.its a fact â┚¬Ã‚¦fightig against our own best interest is stupid :
we need a Public HEALTH CARE Plan now not latter: don’t let this nation become like the republicans- backwards ,dull and divisive before the Global community and to all Americans : the Republican party has breeched its trust and has failed the nation again and again , how many more good and honest people must die before the hands of ruthless corporate owned politicians and there connection with right-wing-Republican-Psychosis /Psychotic /Pyromania/Schizophreniaâ┚¬Ã‚¦.who have nott comme to gripps with the facts of this election and who the people want to govern this nation do you get a little feeling of Separation Anxiety???