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.

OpEd News has published an open letter from attorney Dana Jill Simpson (8/20/09) to "Mr. Murdoch and all the editors at the Wall Street Journal," in which she expresses her wish to "thank you from the very bottom of my heart for running Karl Rove's delusional article, 'Closing In on Rove,' on August 20, 2009":

The reason I want to thank you is that Mr. Rove has clearly lied about me in this article. You have captured and printed it without even checking to see if it is so or not. The lie he has told is and I quote, "Judiciary Democrats didn't get testimony from either Mr. Siegelman or Dana Jill Simpson, the eccentric Alabama lawyer, who drew attention by publicly supporting the allegations." In case you are unaware, I testified on September 14, 2007, before the House Judiciary Committee lawyers that were selected to question me. I most definitely gave sworn testimony to the House Judiciary Democrats. In fact, I gave over 143 pages of testimony before the Judiciary Democratic and Republican lawyers. It is unfortunate that your paper does not give a rip about the truth or you would have checked out the bold-faced lie that Karl Rove put in his article before you printed it.

The OpEd News mini-bio of Simpson notes that she "has appeared on 60 Minutes and Dan Abrams MSNBC," and that "stories were written in Time magazine, Harper's magazine, and the New York Times about her being a witness in the Don Siegelman case on corruption at the Justice Department."

Still, in closing, Simpson tells the Journal she's actually "happy today to call Mr. Rove a liar and you have provided the cold hard proof. You, Mr. Murdoch, gave me that opportunity. I am thankful that you run a paper that apparently does not check for the truth."

News Corpse blogger Mark Howard (7/8/09) has linked to a London Guardian "story that simply must be read":

Rupert Murdoch’s News Group Newspapers has paid out more than £1m to settle legal cases that threatened to reveal evidence of his journalists' repeated involvement in the use of criminal methods to get stories.

The payments secured secrecy over out-of-court settlements in three cases that threatened to expose evidence of Murdoch journalists using private investigators who illegally hacked into the mobile phone messages of numerous public figures and to gain unlawful access to confidential personal data, including tax records, social security files, bank statements and itemised phone bills. Cabinet ministers, MPs, actors and sports stars were all targets of the private investigators.

Cautioning that "the rest of the story just gets more lurid," Howard then updates with what he deems a "shocking look into the way that Murdoch and his accomplices operate" on this side of the Atlantic--namely, through absolutely shameless toadyism:

Rupert Murdoch appeared on his own Fox Business Network today where Stuart Varney, who is notorious for aggressively challenging (i.e., interrupting) liberals, attempted to ask him a question:

Varney: The story that is really buzzing all around the country, and certainly right here in New York, is that the News of the World, a News Corporation newspaper in Britain…
Murdoch: No, I'm not talking about that issue at all today.
Varney: OK. No worries, Mr. Chairman. That's fine with me.

Taking down "Michael Wolff's fat masterpiece of sycophancy about Rupert Murdoch, The Man Who Owns the News," Murdoch Archipelago co-author Bruce Page (CounterPunch, 5/15/09) counters Wolff's "astigmatic lens of gossip" with "a true outline" of Fox/Wall Street Journal mogul Murdoch's roots:

Rupert's father, Sir Keith, founded the dynasty during World War I as a dirty-tricks minion for "Billy" Hughes, probably Australia's nastiest prime minister. His cover myth as a heroic war reporter has been so thoroughly dismantled that now it impresses none but family retainers and--of course--Mr. Wolff.

At Versailles, Keith was Billy's ever-present aide in striving to make the Peace Conference into a vicious cock-up, rich in racist and imperialist content. Curiously, the pair would have had zero leverage but for the failure of a plot of Keith's, which sought in 1918 to remove Australia's battlefield commander on the Western Front, John Monash, for being an unheroic Jew.... Monash's divisions led the British breakthrough...which...put Germany--suddenly, unexpectedly--at the Allies' mercy.

[Australian] soldiers hoped there might be space for a decent peace. But politicians of various brands thought otherwise, and none outdid Keith's boss in vengeful demagoguery, destroying at last all the credit Monash had gained for Australia. Billy and Keith weren't prime authors of the Versailles debacle in 1919. But none toiled harder in its cause.

Page sees "two items of present relevance" in "this ironic history" of the treaty that precipitated the rise of Adolf Hitler's Third Reich: "We see the core of the Murdoch business: offering political propaganda services, disguised thinly as journalism," and then "there's the stunning Murdoch talent for seizing the wrong end of any available political or military stick," calling "Keith's estimate of Monash and Rupert's of the pseudo-warrior Bush Jr... reciprocals, to be sure, but identically crass."

Maureen Dowd today (New York Times, 4/15/09) writes about the newspaper industry's complaints about Google:

Robert Thomson, the top editor of the Wall Street Journal, denounced websites like Google as "tapeworms." His boss, Rupert Murdoch, said that big newspapers do not have to let Google "steal our copyrights." The AP has threatened to take legal action against Google and others that use the work of news organizations without obtaining permission and sharing a "fair" portion of revenue. But what's fair will be hard to prove.

First of all, Google is not stealing anyone's copyrights; quoting the headline and a small bit of text to indicate what various news organizations are reporting about is clearly covered by the fair use exemption to copyright laws.

But Google, rather than insisting on the inherent right that we all have to quote minor amounts of copyrighted material, allows news outlets to opt out of Google News by adding a simple line of code to their websites.  Dowd's piece cites Google CEO Eric Schmidt pointing out that "newspapers could opt out of giving their content to Google free." Apparently they must think they get more from Google linking to them than from Google not linking from them.
So if Google has a right to quote the newspapers' material, and the newspapers see such quotation as beneficial to themselves, why should Google volunteer to write big checks to the newspapers?  Well, because the papers would like to get free money.  And who wouldn't?

If you look at the front page of the New York Post today (3/23/09), you see a big headline about New York State's "Secret Deal to Tax 'Rich.'" The scare quotes are there to indicate, presumably, that the taxpayers in question--whom the Post refers to as "anyone making more than $500,000 a year"--are not really rich.

It's true that such taxpayers aren't as wealthy as, say, Rupert Murdoch, the guy who owns the Post, who has an estimated net worth of $8.3 billion. But they're still doing pretty well, with an income that puts them well into the top half of 1 percent of U.S. households. This is a group that sociologists variously refer to as "the rich," the "upper class" or the "capitalist class."

Interestingly, if you go inside the paper, the actual article bears the headline, "Gov Plots Secret Tax Hike on Rich"--no scare quotes necessary. Maybe Murdoch just reads the front page?

Keeping tabs on the "Fair and Balanced" network, Mark Howard (News Corpse, 3/2/09) details how

last year, prior to the election, Fox News was already fortifying its right flank. New multimillion dollar contracts were handed out to Roger Ailes, Sean Hannity and Bill O'Reilly. Hannity's show shed the dead weight of alleged liberal Alan Colmes. Glenn Beck was brought in to shore up the daytime crowd. Neil Cavuto, a bully who is every bit as obnoxious as O'Reilly poisons the economic news, and he is also managing editor of Murdoch's Fox Business News. And just this week Bill Sammon, author of a shelf full of bitterly partisan books, was promoted to VP and Washington editor for the network.

The result is a full-court press of some of the dirtiest political assaults ever waged by what is advertised as a "news" network. Fox News is shamelessly pushing a campaign to characterize Obama as a socialist--a committed opponent of America and its values--from 6:00 am with the crew of Fox & Friends, to after midnight with broadcasts and repeats of their primetime neanderthal shoutcasters.

Howard even reminds us that, as usual, "they get their marching orders directly from Rupert Murdoch who last September said that… "[Obama's] policy is really very, very naive, old fashioned, 1960s socialist."

The Wall Street Journal has named right-winger Gerard Baker (formerly at the Times of London) its new deputy editor-in-chief. This reaction I find somewhat puzzling:

It would be one thing for Baker to move to the conservative editorial page, but the self-described "right-wing curmudgeon" will have a role overseeing news coverage, a move that surprised some staffers because of his strong, right-wing political views.

Wait a second. You mean to tell me that Rupert Murdoch is going to use one of his media platforms to promote his right-wing politics!?