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Rupert Murdoch Pushes Facebook To Pay For News To Guarantee Quality (bloomberg.com) 104

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Rupert Murdoch, the media billionaire who controls the Wall Street Journal, called on Facebook to begin paying publishers fees to carry the news that its users post and share online in a sign of the print industry's growing frustration with social media. "If Facebook wants to recognize 'trusted' publishers then it should pay those publishers a carriage fee similar to the model adopted by cable companies," Murdoch, the executive chairman of News Corp. said Monday in a statement. "The publishers are obviously enhancing the value and integrity of Facebook through their news and content but are not being adequately rewarded for those services." "Facebook and Google have popularized scurrilous news sources through algorithms that are profitable for these platforms but inherently unreliable," Murdoch said. "Recognition of a problem is one step on the pathway to cure, but the remedial measures that both companies have so far proposed are inadequate, commercially, socially and journalistically." Murdoch, who also leads 21st Century Fox, called for a system similar to that in cable television, where large distributors like Comcast and AT&T pay fees to the TV network owners that attract their viewers.
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Rupert Murdoch Pushes Facebook To Pay For News To Guarantee Quality

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  • Come on (Score:4, Insightful)

    by mrclmn ( 590405 ) on Monday January 22, 2018 @07:04PM (#55982021)
    Do the world a favour Rupert and just die already.
    • by Anonymous Coward

      I doubt the evil he currently stands for will stop with him. His organizations will continue as usual as long as they bring in the money.

      But the headline does raise a question.
      Have Murdoch ever indicated that he is capable of providing quality news? He seems to only push tabloid "news" that are more lies and gossip than not.

      • by lucm ( 889690 )

        At this point most news organizations have lost credibility. They're all biased and dishonest. CNN, NYT, WaPo, FoxNews, it's all the same problem; the things they report and the way they report them, it's always driven by politics.

        And it goes beyond just the actual news; the moderators on their comment threads are also biased, the op ed they promote are biased, and as we saw with Keurig even the ad selection is biased.

        These news providers should package their crap and sell it on build-your-echo-chamber.com

        • by Anonymous Coward

          At this point most news organizations have lost credibility.

          A lot of them are bad, but it appears to be mostly because of laziness.
          Sometimes you see other newspapers print something that was reported by RT without doing any form of verification if the info was correct.
          That is how lies and propaganda finds its way into most newspapers.

          When it comes to Murdoch he directly instructs his "journalists" to not do research and instead pushes information he knows is incorrect.

          Anything Murdoch touches really takes a dive to the bottom.
          You can pick anything that he doesn't ha

          • If you can't see the difference you should probably not vote

            There we go.

            Step 1: only allow people who think like you to vote
            Step 2: force people who don't think like you to wear a visible mark on their clothes
            Step 3: start sterilizing them

            You lovely tolerant liberals have started your journey to pure evil, and to the bitter end you'll keep thinking that you were right. What a bunch of self-righteous hypocrites.

            Used to tell people like you to go to hell, but lately I've started to wonder if we're not there already.

    • by Maritz ( 1829006 )
      Cunt should've died fucking years ago. I love that he think he knows 'quality' news. You won't find a paper he owns that contradicts his wankerish views on anything, ever.
  • by Anonymous Coward

    In the same sentence?

    Is that supposed to be a joke?

    There's a reason we call it Faux News.

    • by youngone ( 975102 ) on Monday January 22, 2018 @07:25PM (#55982135)
      Rupert also owns The Sun. Rupert also spends more time and effort influencing governments than the Russians.
      • Both Russia and Rupert have similar motivations: break up large western countries into fractions. For Russia, it's to prevent opposition to their reforming the USSR (well, in size). For Rupert, it's to better manipulate the populace and make money.

      • by mjwx ( 966435 )

        Rupert also owns The Sun. Rupert also spends more time and effort influencing governments than the Russians.

        This is what I was saying about Brexit. It was propaganda from the leave side... but the Propagandists weren't Russian. We know damn well who they were and that they weren't Johnny Foreigner.

        Murdoch hates the EU, he was once said (I'm probably paraphrasing a little):
        "When I go to Washington, they listen. When I go to Whitehall, they listen. When I go to Brussels, they ignore me".

        Murdoch is quickly losing his position as kingmaker... and it's about damn time.

        However the consequences of the likes of

  • by Pop69 ( 700500 ) <billy@bCURIEenarty.co.uk minus physicist> on Monday January 22, 2018 @07:19PM (#55982095) Homepage
    Sorry, I was laughing so much at the idea of Murdoch and quality news being in the same sentence that I passed out...
    • by epine ( 68316 )

      Sorry, I was laughing so much at the idea of Murdoch and quality news being in the same sentence that I passed out...

      I was too busy picturing the Australian supervillain Cyberswine [internationalhero.co.uk] swinging into battle on a long rope, emitting a leather-lunged battle cry of "scuuuuurilouusss".

  • by jblues ( 1703158 ) on Monday January 22, 2018 @07:21PM (#55982109)
    Brilliant. It will be like building a wall between the consumers and a fair and balanced view, and making the consumers pay for it.
    • by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

      Brilliant. It will be like building a wall between the consumers and a fair and balanced view, and making the consumers pay for it.

      So... why not take this idea then? That way we can tell facebook to shove it and not pay him, thus blocking his news articles from showing up.

      To me, it seems like a great idea, Murdoch requires payment, facebook doesn't pay, Murdoch blocks facebook, everyone benefits.

  • by blahplusplus ( 757119 ) on Monday January 22, 2018 @07:22PM (#55982113)

    ... of fake news. I love this bullshit that mainstream media has been pushing. The reality is the elites have lost control of the public mind and don't like it.

    • If only the public mind translated to the publics votes, it might be worth something. (R) or (D) the country is still controlled by the elites, and they even elected the worse of the two for house, senate, and presidency, because trickle down will surely work this time if we just give the ultra-rich a little more and get rid of the brown people interfering with that. Nope, the elites are still firmly in control and people continually vote against their own interests, thanks to the little 'us versus them' si
  • And I actually buy a print copy of the WSJ once or twice each week.

    Just say NO!

  • by riley ( 36484 ) on Monday January 22, 2018 @07:30PM (#55982167)
    And we are supposed to believe that the owner of Fox News is the guardian of quality information presented in an unbiased format? Really?
    • And we are supposed to believe that the owner of Fox News is the guardian of quality information presented in an unbiased format? Really?

      During the election, I actually had no trouble finding Fox's coverage of the same stories Trump supporters refused to read because it came from the "biased liberal media". Of course, once I posted a link to Fox, they still wouldn't read it, because that's cognitive dissonance for you.

      Heck, it wasn't even that hard to find an article on Breitbart [breitbart.com] where they're not exactly singing the praises of Trump's tax plan. But I'm sure those drinking the kool aid just see it as an acceptable casualty of making sure t

    • Fox News - as watched (and regularly praised) by the US President!

      Tells you all you need to know ;-)

  • by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Monday January 22, 2018 @07:42PM (#55982231)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • by Riceballsan ( 816702 ) on Monday January 22, 2018 @07:46PM (#55982243)
    Right now it seems like we've got 2 real camps for news. The mainstream media, which 99% of the time their extent of "journalism" is to read the press releases/talking points of the corporations, politicians, political parties etc... that help fund them, and expend zero resources finding out whether any of it is actually true or not. Then we have the wild west of free media. A world where they take the same press releases, then pull out of their ass whatever interpretation and guesses they can make from that fit the bias's of the target audience. Neither type is worth the pixels on the screen they are written on
    • BBC does real journalism, as you describe it.

      They have a huge network of reporters around the world, embedded in the local cultures for years at a time, picking up the kind of fascinating news stories that I don't see elsewhere.

      Listen to the programme 'From Our Own Correspondent' for a taste. US listeners don't need to worry. Most of what's covered hasn't reached the US level of attention needed to give it partisan spin yet...

      True there are other bits of the BBC that don't do real journalism as you describe

  • by GerryGilmore ( 663905 ) on Monday January 22, 2018 @07:55PM (#55982291)
    Seriously, that is some 100% Pure, Organic, Dolphin-Free QUALITY Bullshit he peddles. You gotta hand him that.
  • Rupert doesn't get it. The news companies that he owns are some of the perpetrators of the fake news. Facebook paying him when facebook's users post a link to something isn't going to improve the quality.

    It would make him some extra cash, but it wouldn't improve anything other than his bottom line.
  • I mean, the people publishing news under the Murdoch empire are getting paid, and yet, there's no precedence for quality there.
  • I see a lot of knee-jerk flaming, so let's forget who said it and just ask if maybe he's on to something.

    If money was changing hands, would it help the "fake news" problem on facebook?

    • You can buy fake news as well as real news... but I'd say that if you've chosen to pay, at least you're going to choose what you're paying for.

      So if Facebook had paid news feeds, you'd have some confidence that they were feeds Facebook had approved. What that is worth depends on your assessment of Facebook.

      • If they were paying for certain sources, it's likely they would also mark them, distinguishing them from literal fake news (ads/BS that look like news reports).

        Though I also assume that more than anything, Murdoch wants to get paid. Doesn't mean he doesn't have a point, but it is certainly worth noting.

    • I'd argue it'd make the problem worse (although as an ex-FBer, maybe I don't know what I'm talking about).

      If the only 'reliable' news sources (as marked by FB) were actually paid for, then FB would probably avoid chosing the more expensive ones if they could. Thus, the only 'reliable' sources of news will be the cheap ones. "Cheap" and "reliable" aren't usually synonymous.

      For example, let's say both the BBC and Fox News have coverage of (say) Trump's 30% tariff on solar panels. The BBC generally do a pretty

  • If facebook ends up paying for Wall Street Journal content, then the full content should be available to all facebook users. Not just a couple sentences like it is today.

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