When Rupert Murdoch speaks, the corporate media world listens. Even when what he says is uninformed, self-serving and counter-productive. The miscreant media mogul who brought us the misanthropic Fox News Channel, ruined the Wall Street Journal and MySpace, has turned his sights on Kindle, the Amazon eletronic reading module.
No question Murdoch is a great businessman and the most powerful media master in the world. But he’s not a news person. He doesn’t care about government transparency, citizen or investigative journalism, or even the First Amendment. What he cares about is selling information. Like all other media executives, he’s so scared of the Internet, its openness and freedom and subsequent competition, that he’s spending more and more money and attacking its foundations. But don’t be fooled. Murdoch and his ilk are experts at manipulating information and misleading people. Murdoch and the others aren’t attacking because they disagree with the Internet’s wild west atmosphere. They’re attacking to take it over now that they’ve destroyed their own once-powerful and still technologically-viable distribution models: TV, radio, and print.
They are trying to take over the Internet and ironically knock out their most threatening competition: FREE SPEECH. But they’re disguising their assault as a business decision. Hulu is a perfect example of how TV executives are trying to hoard bandwidth in order to make their videos run smoother and cleaner on-line. Meanwhile, small, new businesses like me, the supposed future of the media business, are being squashed because networks, corporations like Google and AT&T are getting platinum status from the people managing the pipeline while the little guys scramble for seats in coach.
Forcing a “pay-to-play” model on Internet information consumers is the least of the threats. What Murdoch, NBC/Universal and the other media congloms are doing is undemocratic, anti-freedom and a tremendous waste of the powerful distribution models they already own: namely radio and TV stations and newspapers. But like America’s banks who destroyed themselves with greed and incompetence, corporate media are seeking a government bailout in the form of unrestricted and free access to the Internet. Knowing the FCC, they will likely allow this to happen. Because big government and big media are big buddies: lobbyists, lawyers, campaign contributors. Screw the little people. What do they know?
Then we’ll see our greatest fears come to pass: the Internet becoming just another place to watch TV and read newspapers. That would be a tragedy of Darwinian proportions.
