A little while ago I wrote about my news practice, in part of which I noted that I have a problem with the way that so much content is available for free, supported by online advertising. Now, not too much farther into the future, Rupert Murdoch is talking about pulling all of his content out of Google, and today we learned that he is currently in talks with Microsoft towards completing this end.
Free implies easy access, and access to information has long been the eventual goal of the Google corporation. There are a lot of wonderful benefits that come with having information readily available, and in the end it gives us all a bit more power and knowledge. Murdoch’s move, then, is opposite these directives. In some frightening application of spin, I can see that the privatized content is supposedly marked as “premium” and more authoritative than cheap or “lowly” alternatives. I just hope that, in this particular case, that doesn’t attract much attention.
Journalism is incredibly important, and I don’t want to see it go away. With free options and so many difficulties in finding funding, it’s scary to think that we could go into the dark because of market patterns. In some ways, charging for content can be and should be a good thing. I want to help pay, if only in small amounts, to have people find the stories and the underlying problems that happen on both world and local scales.
The trouble, then, is that Murdoch isn’t making this move to stay afloat; it’s a power play designed to generate more profit in an attempt to further whatever agendas he sees fit. Are we going to see RIAA and MPAA equivalents, finding and persecuting anyone who seems to have copied a Newscorp feed? Copyright and protection seems a logical extension of this ethos, though I imagine they’ll move slowly enough that it’s off the radar until a few years down the road.
I hope that I’m just being a bit paranoid, though if so many people already can put on Fox news and consider it to “fair and balanced” in any way, shape, or form, it’s not too much of a leap to think of other ways in which the bulk of the population can be manipulated and followed down other dark alleys. Google needs to keep doing what it’s doing, and in the best case this will be a very public wrong step for Murdoch and other similar conglomerates.