Posted on 10/05/2017 10:28:19 PM PDT by TigerLikesRooster
Rupert Murdoch Is The Media’s Unlikely Hero In The War Against Facebook And Google
Murdoch's bare-knuckle tactics are familiar to his many media enemies. Now his sights are set on Silicon Valley, and fellow media executives are starting to think the billionaire villain behind Fox News isn't so bad.
Originally posted on October 4, 2017, at 8:48 p.m.
Updated on October 5, 2017, at 5:12 a.m.
Steven Perlberg
Mark Di Stefano
As the media industry girds for war with Silicon Valley’s powerful tech companies, its executives are coming to a painful realization: Rupert Murdoch saw it coming.
The octogenarian Aussie is seen in his industry as a rogue, a villain, and a bit of a Luddite, crouching behind his paywalls as the future arrives. His empire’s most daring technical innovation might have been phone hacking.
But in recent months, the 86-year-old billionaire has emerged to his industry as something else: a hero.
Murdoch and his chief newspaper lieutenant, News Corp CEO Robert Thomson, have taken a central role in the news industry’s corporate war against Facebook and Google, technology leviathans that have eaten journalism’s business model and forever changed how readers consume information.
That dynamic has until recently been the stuff of insider-y media trade stories and navel-gazing panel discussions, but the 2016 election changed everything. Stories in recent months highlighting Facebook and Google’s fraught role in the election — from the spread of “fake news” to 10 million people viewing Russian-bought ads — have thrust skepticism about the power held by social giants into mainstream public view like never before.
(Excerpt) Read more at buzzfeed.com ...
Didn’t Murdoch pay like a billion dollars for MySpace?
Outrageous prices have been paid for internet properties in the early days. Now too.
I’m going to forgive Murdoch for that business mistake. He took a calculated risk that, if successful, would have propelled Fox into the internet space in a big way. Sometimes you win. Sometimes you lose.
bookmark
$500mm
“I’m going to forgive Murdoch”
I’m not.
After he acquired Dow Jones (which owns the Wall Street Journal- WSJ), the WSJ has continuously become more progressive in its regular news, leaving only a modicum of Conservatism in the OpEd section, and that only because it remains in the editorial control of the WSJ’s former owners, as per the agreement they got when they sold out to Murdoch.
The regular news is not merely more progressive, many articles are nothing less than shilling for the “man made global warming” agenda, green agendas of every kind, electric cars, mass transit and many other Liberal promoted themes.
I'm not sure how much or a corporatist the WSJ has been in the past. When DJT opened my eyes, I began to look at these newspapers quite differently.
I regularly visit the library and I agree that many of the editorial are foolish and are definitely against conservative principles.
And I think the progressives, Wall Street financiers, and Silicon Valley globalists have infected all the major business publications: Fortune, WSJ, and Forbes.
Never mind the British publications like the Economist and Financial Times -- they are downright communist at this point.
So I agree with your perspective.
And I've notice something else. So much of the business press in the US is intent on taking down American free enterprise system rather than build it up. Not enough emphasis is on nurturing it.
They - the major corporate U.S. business community - have lost the principles of how the government should operate to keep their own world in favor of true “free enterprise” market capitalism and not government captured de facto public utilities. Their crony capitalist lobbying meets with and joins the Marxist/Socialist/Progressive/Liberal lobbying and collectively works NOT at putting proper constitutional handcuffs on the regulatory state, but only how to give the Marxists what they want, to expand it forever, as long as they can keep their incomes and jobs, for now.
The “Democrats” then run their politics on the theme that the “corporations are controlling Washington D.C.”, with plenty of corporate lobbying $$$ to make that case, while the actual results are NOT that the corporations have “captured” the regulatory state, but that it is eating their general independence, and slowly everyone’s Liberty with it.
By the time all the major corporations are actual public utilities, their executives that led them to it and consented to it will have retired on the fat benefits that they wouldn’t get if their shareholders really understood what was happening.
Good analysis. And the term "de facto public utilities" is quite descriptive of the situation.
I would also highlight the fact that the large crony capitalists could care less about "free" enterprise. They are only interested in large, protected by regulation enterprises.
Trump is in many ways the triumph of Main Street over Wall Street.
One of my favorite commentators is a guy named Nassim Taleb and I think you would be interested in listening to him if you are unfamiliar.
Here is a one hour YouTube.
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