Opening Insights: Murdoch vs. Facebook
While many have demonized Rupert Murdoch over the years, the truth and integrity of the man have often been overshadowed by his cunning business strategy and celebrity presence. The world is coming to the conclusion that love him or hate him he just my be one of the only empires strong and established enough to stand up to the young bucks of the tech world. According to a Buzzfeed article by Steven Perlberg and Mark Di Stefano: "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."
Yet, as we watch the battle unfold, we have to ask ourselves, have the tech giants have already won? They have not only captured the market, they have significantly changed the market to the point where literacy and attention are becoming, a thing of the past.
If the publishing industry is to take back the narrative, they need a strategy to recapture and change (empower) the market to regain the skills and smarts of the 50's.
The question is ultimately HOW does the publishing industry WIN NO MATTER WHAT? HOW DOES THE PUBLISHING INDUSTRY RETRAIN, REBUILD AND GROW THE MARKET?
Informational Insights: Tech Companies, Taming the "Wild West"
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.
Now media executives are sensing blood in the water — hoping that Facebook and Google’s legitimate public relations nightmare might give news outlets more leverage in business negotiations, and that Washington lawmakers and the public at large will come to see tech giants as public utilities that require regulation.
His bare-knuckle tactics are familiar to both UK election campaigns — “It’s The Sun Wot Won It” — and brutal regulatory battles in the US. In a legendary late 1980s cross-ownership feud in Boston, Murdoch’s Herald newspaper launched a vicious campaign against Senator Ted Kennedy, who had blocked the mogul’s exemption from owning a newspaper and television station in the same market. (Read one anti-Kennedy lead from a Boston Herald columnist: “Was it something I said, Fat Boy?”)
As the most well-connected media mogul in Washington, the news industry might need Murdoch now more than ever.
Google and Facebook might do well to study the Kennedy incident. The Times of London, a Murdoch-owned British daily newspaper, has engaged in a months-long campaign this year exposing various problems with tech platforms, particularly issues that have concerned advertisers. The series began on Feb. 9 when a jarring image was splashed across the front page: an advertisement for resort chain Sandals next to a jihadi YouTube video. “BIG BRANDS FUND TERROR,” read the headline.Since then, the paper has published 18 front pages taking on Facebook and Google, YouTube’s owner, with headlines like “GOOGLE: WE WON’T REMOVE VIDEO THAT ATTACKS JEWS” and “FACEBOOK PUBLISHING CHILD PORN.”
The Times series and subsequent reporting from other outlets this spring (like Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal) sparked an advertiser exodus from YouTube by brands like Sainsbury’s, McDonald’s, and L’Oreal. Thomson even railed against social media companies on an investor call on the same day of the Times’ initial story, adding that, conveniently, News Corp was testing its own digital-advertising network.
The YouTube advertiser revolt didn’t harm Google’s staggeringly strong bottom line, but the Times series rattled the company enough to lead to a face-to-face meeting between Murdoch, Thomson, and Google chief executive Sundar Pichai, according to sources.
“[Google and Facebook] would prefer we didn't draw so much attention to the problematic content on their platforms. Understand firstly that we're not going to stop. Secondly, this content is a huge issue,” said a senior executive at Murdoch’s UK newspapers.
To be sure, journalists across the board have been homing in on Facebook and Google because it has been a captivating story.
Lawmakers and regulators from Washington to London to Brussels have begun scrutinizing tech giants once lauded as corporate darlings. Facebook, Google, and Twitter are being dragged to Capitol Hill to answer questions about Russian attempts to use social media to influence the 2016 presidential election. Mark Zuckerberg has spent months walking back Facebook’s PR line that the company’s influence in the election was a “pretty crazy idea.” Google was slapped with a monster antitrust fine after a seven-year EU investigation.
For media executives, the tides of public opinion turning against Facebook and Google couldn’t have come any sooner, and they are happy to keep up the pressure. News Corp sources describe its battle against the platforms as a business, not moral imperative.
That’s because the so-called duopoly of Facebook and Google, by some estimates, accounted for nearly 100% of the growth in US digital ad revenue last year. Nearly all mainstream media outlets derive a mammoth portion of their audience from the very platforms that are swallowing them whole. Some digital upstarts have built entire businesses on the backs of the social platforms, and are therefore routinely beholden to the whims of their tech overlords (case in point: the “pivot to video”). For years, that reality has been enough to keep media executives up at night — but also hushed in their criticism.
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“The digital duopoly clearly benefited from commodifying content and rewarding sites, fake or flawed, that gamed search engines and peddled witless clickbait at the expense of provenance and professional journalism,” Thomson told BuzzFeed News in a statement. “That commercial and social damage has been a serious concern for many, many years, and yet other publishers have been supine in the face of this assault on principle and profit.”
Sources close to Thomson, long a loyal Murdoch ally in both London and New York, say the battle against Google is ultimately his baby, more so than Murdoch, who since the Roger Ailes scandal has taken on the top role at Fox News. But it’s a narrative happily championed by the close-knit circle of executives at News Corp and 21st Century Fox, sister companies that split in 2013. James Murdoch, Rupert’s son and chief executive of 21st Century Fox, recently lambasted Facebook for its problem with the “damn Russians.” “You’ve got to be kidding me,” he said in an interview with The Information.
The Murdochs have a reason to play up any negative news about Facebook or Google. News Corp, like all media companies, is engaged in a losing fight with the “duopoly” for a finite amount of digital advertising money. News Corp also collides with Google through its investment in AppNexus, a rival to Google’s DoubleClick. And then there’s News Corp’s planned digital ad network, announced the day of the first Times story and still in development.
“If you think the timing of the Times investigation and the launch of News Corp’s new digital ad strategy was purely a coincidence, well, I’ve got a bridge to sell you,” said one senior advertising executive.
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Sources close to Murdoch and Thomson characterize their position fairly simply: They want large tech platforms to pay them for their content, and they aren’t afraid to use their own media properties as weapons. Which isn’t to say that reporters are directly told to go after Facebook or Google, but that those stories are prioritized, given heavier promotion and placement, and then championed by the executive structure.
“The power of the campaigning British newspaper is planting a seed in the head of the audience — many who aren’t spending hours and hours on the internet. They’re saying, ‘You probably wouldn’t know the evil that your Google or your Facebook are hosting. Here it is and here’s why you should care,’” said a former senior editor at a UK Murdoch paper. “Over months, maybe even years, that little seed grows and attitudes can start changing.”
But a senior correspondent at The Sun, Murdoch’s tabloid, said the paper was genuinely concerned with big tech — and that the coverage was more than just a self-interested business battle.
“Most of the coverage of the tech giants is linked to the terror stuff because that’s what our audience cares about,” this person said. “The editor genuinely believes the internet is the Wild West and tech companies, some which are bigger than governments, should be doing more to make it safer.”
Ultimately, sources close to Murdoch say that he hopes to push public opinion into viewing tech platforms more like Wall Street banks. And after years of bitter criticism, a softer refrain is echoing among Murdoch’s media contemporaries: Say what you want about Rupert, but he does love the news business.
Source: https://www.buzzfeed.com/stevenperlberg/rupert-murdoch-is-the-medias-unlikely-hero-against-tech
Possibilities for Consideration: Freedom of Press
Rupert Murdoch is 86 years old, while many may doubt his integrity and moral standing, he has voiced his opinion on the importance of freedom of the press, journalistic integrity and the social engineering he has watched consume the world. He has created a legacy within the publishing world, yet he is smart enough to not only be concerned about the legacy of his company, but the survival of the publishing industry as a whole.
However, in the fight for revival of the publishing world we have to examine what we are fighting for. Our technical world has created cultures and shadow cultures of people that have learned not to read and learn - they have been conditioned to be entertained and seek instant gratification. If the publishing industry is to survive it needs to not just capture the market, but clearly define a pathway to change the market, to empower the market that has been dumbed down.
- What if the way forward results in us needing to step back?
- What if the publishers land up winning, what are they going to do to address the new type of reader that the technology world has created (with attention spans of less than a gold fish)?
- What if there is a way to reverse our learned behaviors and social conditioning to learn how to read and learn again?
Add Your Insight:
Much of what passes for quality on British television
is no more than a reflection of the values of the narrow elite which controls it.
RUPERT MURDOCH