Rupert Murdoch Is A Lying Ignoramus

Posted by Pinky on Apr 7, 2010 in Blog | 2 comments

Rupert Murdoch was interviewed last night by Marvin Kalb for the National Press Club in Washington D.C.    FETRNU5F24MB

A few highlights:

• He strongly believes that the iPad will single-handedly save the newspaper industry.
• He uses that position to illustrate that he is not a techno-phobe, as he has been accused of being since the dawn of the Internet.
• He expects Google to suffer when he stops letting them list the New York Times news headlines on news.google.com. (Which link through to his websites when a reader wants the full story.)
• When the floor was opened up to Q&A, many in attendance pressed him on the GOP-bias of Fox News.  He said their was none.  (The crowd snickered.)
• When asked to name a single Democrat-leaning news commentator on the network, he could not name one.  He did, however, assure the crowd that “they were there,” and said “Greta Van Susteren is certainly close to the Democratic Party.”

Well, that’s a resounding answer.  Meanwhile, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity and Bill O’Reilly roll right off the tongue, along with special commentators Sarah Palin and the legendary Carl Rove.  I’d say they’re pretty “close to the Republican party,” if you want to “put it that way.”

So what in the world do all of these stab-your-eyes-out-in-pure-frustration factoids have to do with this blog?

Well, for one, the iPad is super cool but it will not be the savior of his endangered business model soon enough to prevent its extinction.  Newspapers as we know them are going away, folks.  Deal with it.

Charging for content works in very limited scenarios.  Wall Street Journal?  Check.  New York Times?  No dice.  Newpapers have never made a profit on subscription fees alone.  Subscribers = eyeballs = advertising dollars.  Even if 100% of their former paid subscriber-base paid to access the paper online, the ads they would be exposed to are so dramatically less profitable than the equivalent placement in print, the paper would still go bust.  Now, instead of tens-of-millions of “free” visitors a month viewing hundreds-of-millions of advertising impressions, they will have hundreds-of-thousands of subscribers seeing millions of impressions.  The result will be a dead business more quickly than it otherwise would have been. But at least they’ll be put out of their misery.

Will the New York Times completely disappear?  I don’t think so.  Just as the brand name “Napster” lives on years after the demise of its namesake service, a strong name is an asset in its own right.  I could see a complete tear-down and rebuild of an online news service CALLED the New York Times, but I don’t think it will even resemble the current business structure.

And finally, Rupert Murdoch is a bold-faced liar and always has been.

“I challenge anybody to show me an example of bias in Fox News Channel.”–Rupert Murdoch (Salon, 3/1/01)

John Stewart wouldn’t be in business if they didn’t make it as easy as they do.  Being unable to name a single left-wing pundit while hosting 5 of the most prominent of the right pretty much says the rest.

Today’s takeaway: Don’t ever buy a newspaper empire, and if you do, at least give your audience a little credit for having independent thought.  “Because I said so” is a great answer when you’re speaking to a 3-year-old, but I’m like, way older than that now.

#End Rant