Rupert Murdoch may have indicated that News Corporation could miss its target of charging for all its news websites by next summer, but in his latest interview he steps up his war on the “content kleptomaniacs” of the internet.
As well as raising the possibility that he could block Google from including his newspapers’ stories in its search index, the media mogul signals that he has the online news provided by ABC and the BBC in his sights:
[If] you look at them, most of their stuff is stolen from the newspapers now, and we’ll be suing them for copyright. They’ll have to spend a lot more money on a lot more reporters to cover the world when they can’t steal from newspapers.
The removal of stories from Google and other web “parasites” would lead to a dramatic fall in traffic but it’s hard to imagine Murdoch losing much sleep over this. The advertising revenue that follows web users is too paltry to be worthy of his attention.
His plan to charge for digital content is in many ways designed not to make online news profitable but to push people back to print.
As his biographer Michael Wolff has written: “The more he can choke off the internet as a free news medium, the more publishers he can get to join him, the more people he can bring back to his papers. It is not a war he can win in the long term, but a little Murdoch rearguard action might get him to his own retirement. Then it’s somebody else’s problem.”
I’m convinced that James Murdoch, the heir apparent to the News Corp empire, will veto his father’s more outlandish proposals regarding Google, but otherwise the company’s strategy appears fixed.
At 78 years old, Murdoch is gearing up for one of the biggest battles of his life. He will not go gentle into that good night.
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