Candidate #1: Arlington, Tennessee mayor Russell Wiseman, who took to his Facebook page with a message of despair upon learning that Obama's speech had trumped Charlie Brown, on the teevee. We'll just blockquote this thoroughly worthwhile Commercial Appeal story:

"Ok, so, this is total crap, we sit the kids down to watch 'The Charlie Brown Christmas Special' and our muslim president is there, what a load.....try to convince me that wasn't done on purpose. Ask the man if he believes that Jesus Christ is the Son of God and he will give you a 10 minute disertation (sic) about it....w...hen the answer should simply be 'yes'...."...

In Wiseman's extensive thread that attacked the president, his supporters and Muslims, he stated "...you obama people need to move to a muslim country...oh wait, that's America....pitiful."

At another point he said, "you know, our forefathers had it written in the original Constitution that ONLY property owners could vote, if that has stayed in there, things would be different........"

No further comment. Contestant #2: News Corp! Which just bought a 10% stake in Rotana, a media company owned by Saudi Prince Waleed. Why the outrage? Well after September 11, you see, various Fox News commentators were outraged at Waleed! Because he suggested that maybe US foreign policy had something to do with the attacks. So NYC rejected a $10 million check from him. Media Matters has some choice quotes:

Bill Sammon: "[I]t's blood money and we're better off without it."
Sean Hannity: Al-Waleed's statement was "such an egregious, outrageous, unfair offense that I would have nothing to do with his money either."

Unless that money comes in the form of dividends from media company profits! So, vote for your god damn favorite. [Pic via]

We were alerted to this item by NPR's public relations department, and we relay it to you with all deliberate speed: Justin Timberlake was photographed wearing an NPR t-shirt. Carl Kasell was then photographed wearing an 'N Sync t-shirt.


Keith Kelly has news about our favorite unnerving British ex-flack/ ex-celeb mag editor, Rob Shuter, former executive editor of OK!, is hooking up with the AOL pop culture site Popeater as a new Hollywood columnist. His column, Naughty and Nice, is slated to appear Tuesday through Friday." Rob Shuter has the evolutionary persistence of the cockroach!


News-and-museum combo The Newseum is laying off 13% of its staff, the second round of job cuts since the place opened just in time for the total collapse of the newspaper industry. These are the most predictable museum layoffs since...whatever is the auto industry museum. They probably had layoffs recently, too. [Related: the Miami Herald is down to a church bulletin.]


Rupert Murdoch is keeping busy: News Corp just finalized a deal to buy a 10% stake in Rotana, a Middle Eastern media conglomerate owned by Saudi Prince Waleed. Pay no attention the Australian behind the curtain, Middle Easterners! I guess this makes MSNBC and Al-Jazeera spiritual cousins.

And today in Mediabistro news:

John Koblin puts a number on the Wall Street Journal's recently announced plans to move into New York City metro coverage: $15 million. "You could drive a truck through the space between the wonderfully titillating tabloids and the perceived self-seriousness of The Times," says one PR man in the NYO. It's a big enough budget to help fill that gap. Although Rupert would prefer to just drive that truck directly over the Times.

And that's his smallest ongoing fight! Much bigger, in the grand scheme of things, is Rupert's willingness to be the media mogul who shouts out loud the thing that all the other media moguls grumble under their breath: Google is stealing from us! Why just yesterday, Rupert said:

"There are those who think they have a right to take our news content and use it for their own purposes without contributing a penny to its production. Some rewrite — at times without attribution — the news stories of expensive and distinguished journalists who invested days, weeks, or even months on their stories — all under the tattered veil of fair use."

He has (some of) a point! And even more remarkably, Google knows it. The Googleplex announced that they're going to (somewhat) close the technological loophole that allowed you to use Google News to jump over pay walls and read stories for free. Instead of being able to go to Google News, type in a headline from, say, the WSJ, and read as many stories as you want without subscribing, now Google "will allow publishers to limit non-subscribers to five free articles a day."

Rupert gets results. The New York Times is probably offering him a free Weekender subscription right now, to try to soften him up. But don't get it twisted: He's just begun to fight. He likes this stuff!

Lachlan's investment vehicle Illyria is putting up half of a reported $70 million bid to purchase the Hollywood Reporter, Billboard, Brandweek, and Mediaweek from Nielsen Communications, according to the Financial Times. The other half comes from an investor group that includes James Finkelstein, the owner of Roll Call The Hill.

The Hollywood Reporter is, to put it mildly, failing. And while Billboard is reportedly treading water, its future is bleak when one considers the fact that it is a trade journal devoted to covering a business (the music industry) that for all intents and purposes doesn't really exist anymore. The logic of paying $70 million for properties that either don't make much money or are losing money and positioned to do little else but continue losing money eludes us.

Unless you happen to be the son of Rupert Murdoch, who promised you, his eldest son, the keys to his kingdom only to leave your mother and marry a much younger woman and then cast you aside, forcing you to return to your native Australia to nurse your wounds and plot your revenge. Maybe then it makes sense to buy yourself a little spot in Hollywood from which to spit in Old Dad's eyes now and again. Prior to the Nielsen move, Lachlan's acquisitions had been decidedly boring—he purchased half of an Australian radio chain earlier this month for $110 million, and he owns a piece of an Indian cricket team.

It's also worth noting the psychodynamic implications of Lachlan's unloading of half his nonvoting shares in News Corp. earlier this month, to the tune of $23 million. He got those shares under a settlement after his father attempted to cut his children with his third wife Wendi Deng in on the family business, violating a prior agreement to leave the company in the control Lachlan and his brothers and sisters. Now he's dumping it to finance his own acquisitions, including a Hollywood rag that closely monitors the doings of Daddy's company.

Or he could just be stupid and enjoys wasting money. That's always a possibility.

The most popular story on WSJ.com today has been their semi-exclusive about Joe Lieberman saying he's never going to vote for a health care bill with the public option. If you heard about Lieberman making news on health care today and went to Google "lieberman public option," you'd get these results. The shaded red boxes are the News Corp. properties: WSJ.com and Foxnews.com. Those would disappear, but there would be no shortage of results showing you what Lieberman told the WSJ in the top results.

But let's say you were really motivated to find the specific Wall Street Journal story about Joe Lieberman derailing health care and you searched "lieberman public option" and "wall street journal." That would currently bring up the story in question, as well as the Fox News result and an old WSJ blog post. But it would also bring up plenty of other sites that can tell you what was in the WSJ story. Those all likely will also provide a link to the WSJ story, but if they put up the pay wall Murdoch has promised, why would you bother to click through?

Lastly, here's a search for "lieberman public option" and "wall street journal," but with results from WSJ.com and FoxNews.com filtered out—in other words, what Google would return if they weren't allowed to index News Corp. pages.

All but the top two results — irrelevant HuffPo stories — show you exactly what Lieberman said in the Wall Street Journal. And would conceivably show you a link to the WSJ. So, no big loss.

For years, newspapers and other media companies have complained about Google reaping profits by indexing media content for free. Google has responded that media companies are free to remove themselves from Google's search engines if they wish. But media companies never actually did it, because the hit to their traffic would be too big. They'd prefer to just get paid by the search engines. Which is what Rupert Murdoch may now do.

Business Insider estimates that the Wall Street Journal, News Corp's most prized media property, would lose about $15 million by pulling out of Google—meaning that Bing could theoretically secure exclusive search engine rights for that price. The money is almost too small to matter. But this could be a trigger for much bigger things. Namely, the Great Search Engine Wars for media content.

Brian Lam argues that this move would hurt consumers. Instead of being able to go to Google to find everything, consumers would have to know which specific media outlets had exclusive deals with which search engines in order to track down their content.

And that's absolutely true! This trend, if it becomes widespread—every big media company hunting for the richest deal it can get from a search engine—would make life more inconvenient for media consumers like you and me. Which doesn't mean that it's necessarily bad. The fact is that the current situation cannot stand. Have you read our #layoffs tag lately? Rupert Murdoch—and other media owners—are tired of Google making money off their content, for free. The original idea was that the traffic driven to media sites by Google would provide enough revenue, through ads, to make everyone happy. That hasn't turned out to be the case. Online ad revenue is not doing the trick.

So media companies will need new revenue streams to survive. A big one will be paid content; i.e., if you want to read the New York Times online, you will have to pay some sort of subscription fee. But search engine deals like this—in which media companies make search engines pay for exclusive rights to access their content—are another online revenue stream that could become significant. News Corp's deal isn't big money, yet. But presumably if Google and its competitors realize they will have to engage in bidding wars to lock in rights to good media content, the value of those deals would increase considerably.

The bigger picture is this: Yes, the "journalism" industry will shrink. That's part of the future. Fine. But even with the wondrous world of blogs and nonprofit journalism foundations and every other new permutation of creating content, the fact remains that if people want to enjoy a fundamental baseline of serious news media in this country, they will have to pay for it, somehow. Yes, it's more inconvenient to have search engines with exclusive content deals. It's also inconvenient to have to pay to read online news. But these and other new revenue streams will have to come into place if we don't want to keep griping forever about journalists being laid off and news quality getting shittier. Everything cannot always be free and delivered directly to us on a platter when it costs money to make, okay! So try not to fear the portentous coming of the Search Engine Bidding Wars. We're just going through the bumpy phase of things now. You'll get used to it. And the annoying kid you sent to J-school might actually be able to land a job one day, too.

[My colleagues do not necessarily agree with me!]

Murdoch made the bizarre comment at a Wall Street Journal conference earlier this week, and he called Paterson in Albany yesterday to, in Paterson's words, apologize "like a gentleman." Which is odd, because in Murdoch-world, gentlemen do not apologize—they attack, destroy, and admit nothing. Murdoch's newfound willingness to eat crow—remember that he also apologized for the New York Post's cartoon depicting President Barack Obama as a dead chimpanzee—is disconcerting to those of us who make a living in part from chronicling his vile behavior. Is he growing a conscience?

An anonymous Paterson aide told the New York Daily News that the governor considered Murdoch's remark a "random misstatement," which points to a more likely explanation for the News Corp. CEO's odd behavior of late: The old man is losing it. We look forward to more random misstatements in the near future.

Murdoch was on a panel with Indian mogul Ratan Tata and Mexican billionaire and future New York Times owner Carlos Slim. The question that elicited Murdoch's bizarre reference to New York Gov. David Paterson was clearly directed at Fox News: "How do we bring more civil discourse to the discussion, and stop appealing to the populists on the right and the left?"

One way would be to not pay people millions of dollars to pursue bizarre conspiracy theories and call the first black president a racist—but that's not the Murdoch way! No, Murdoch's slurred, barely coherent answer blamed politicians, including Paterson, who, it's important to note, is "blind, and can't read braille, and doesn't know what's going on." And therefore is responsible for the lack of civil discourse in our political conversation. Class act. Good thing Murdoch has leftie liaison Gary Ginsberg at hand to smooth this over for him.

We're just going to throw this out there: Rupert Murdoch is not well. This senseless gaffe, on top of his strange and uncomprehending assertion last week that Barack Obama is indeed a racist just like Glenn Beck said and that no one at Fox News has ever compared Obama to Stalin when they obviously do on a nearly nightly basis, make him seem strange and muddled. He's getting old, and it's showing.

The conference had another highlight—Slim's defensive and belittling discussion of his minority stake in the New York Times. Asked why he loaned a quarter of a billion dollars to the struggling paper, Slim responded with a casual, "Why not?" before nearly interrupting the panel's moderator to point out that on top of a 14% interest rate, he'd received warrants in the deal. Asked to elaborate on the value of media investments, Slim started with, "I think the New York Times will pay. It was credit, with a high yield, and warrants." How reassuring. Slim did offer a perfunctory defense of the Times as a business, calling it one of the best newspapers in the world. Then he offered to lend money to the Wall Street Journal at 12%, two points better than he gave to the Times.

Ginsberg was the genius who convinced Murdoch to cooperate with biographer/scorpion Michael Wolff. Murdoch spent 50 hours with Wolff and even granted access to his 99-year-old mother, and Wolff's biography ended up portraying him—surprise!—as manipulative, petty, and, worst of all (for Ginsberg at least) embarrassed by the unabashed white rage on display at Roger Ailes' Fox News Channel.

According to Wolff, Ginsberg was deeply involved in overseeing the access he had to Murdoch and "sat in on many of my interviews with Murdoch with head in Blackberry while Rupert ran at the mouth." Murdoch was apoplectic at the result, perhaps on Ailes' behalf. What followed the book's publication, according to Wolff, was an internal effort to purge News Corp. of Ginsberg's leftist influence.

"The person who really became his antagonist was Ailes," Wolff told Gawker. "Ailes has been telling people he was going to get Ginsberg. Also, Ginsberg was [former News Corp. chief operating officer Peter] Chernin's guy, so when Chernin left handwriting was on wall."

With Chernin and now Ginsberg gone, Murdoch's brief flirtation with sanity—remember when the New York Post endorsed Obama in the New York primary?—appears to be over, and Ailes has the run of the place. Which may explain why Murdoch just publicly agreed with Glenn Beck's contention that the first black president of the United States is a racist. Ginsberg won't be around next time to explain how he didn't really mean it.

UPDATE: We found a bit of behind-the-scenes evidence of how Ginsberg operated as a communications corridor to the left wing in the Spitzer Files, our collection of correspondence between Eliot Spitzer's flacks and the media at the height of Spitzer's hooker crisis. Three days after the story of Spitzer's prostitute habit broke, New York communications consultant Jordan Tamagni wrote Ginsberg to complain about a Post story that called Spitzer's wife Silda Wall a "doormat" and accused her of "sending her daughters a message that it's acceptable for a woman to behave like an object on which men wipe their shoes":

Hi, G. Far be it from me to question the editorial control of the NY Post, or heaven forfend, to lay it at your doorstep, but today's two page spread about Silda Wall was so egregious that I can't stop myself from writing. There's an especially loathsome piece by Andrea Peyser so utterly lacking in compassion or understanding that it literally took my breath away. It is so cruel and unnecessary that the mind really boggles. What the hell are they thinking over there? The paper treats the hooker WITH MORE COMPASSION THAN IT DOES SILDA.... I am really so mad that I can't see straight. Please advise.

Instead of dismissing or ignoring the criticism, Ginsberg brought it to Post editor Col Allan's attention and offered something of a peace pipe. Ginsberg responded to Tamagni just over an hour later:

Col Allan, the Post editor-in-chief, has invited you to submit a piece that he will run. Interested?

Tamagni forwarded Ginsberg's invitation to Spitzer's communications director Christine Anderson to discuss the idea, which is how it ended up in our public records request. As far as we can tell, no such op-ed, by Tamagni or anyone else, ever ran in the Post. But Ginsberg's role was clearly in part to mollify angry Democrats and bring them into the fold to the extent that he could. No more.

Pic via AFHU

News Corp. Chief Digital Officer Jonathan Miller (pictured) said at a Monaco media event that his conglomerate plans to block Google (at least partially) within "months and quarters — not weeks... The traffic which comes in from Google... is the least valuable of traffic to us." That's according to the Telegraph, and followed similar comments from Miller's boss Rupert Murdoch just days before.

So why all the noise? Blocking Google is a straightforward process involving simple text files, not a big act of war that requires lengthy preparation.

Maybe Microsoft has offered News Corp. a middle ground between charging for content and leaving search engines entirely. Bing might offer a cut of ad revenue to News Corp. and other content providers in return for exclusively appearing in the Microsoft search engine, former weblog entrepreneur Jason Calacanis recently suggested.

And that idea isn't far fetched. The Associated Press's CEO recently said Microsoft was offering AP many more favors than Google:

Curley said he was negotiating a new partnership with Microsoft under conditions more favorable to the AP and its members...



Someone asked Curley if Microsoft was willing to accept the AP's demands. "They have said very strongly that they would," Curley responded... "They know how to have a conversation." And what about Google? "I'm not talking about Google," he said. "We haven't talked."

So maybe in the end Rupert Murdoch, the doddering newspaper fetishist, will have the last laugh over Google, reclaiming "his" content revenue... and delivering it straight to Bill Gates and Microsoft. Oh, Rupert.

(Pic by Dave McClure)

UPDATE: This new TechCrunch story about Microsoft's meeting with European publishers confirms that Microsoft's strategy is to ally with the likes of News Corp. against Google: "Microsoft plans to launch an assault on Google's flank, by cosying up to major content providers, especially newspapers, that feel hard done by Google News."

Please be advised that a demonstration, directed at FOX News and consisting of approximately 150 people, is expected in front of 1211 today (Wednesday, November 11) from 12:00 pm to 2:00 pm. The NYPD will be present to monitor the demonstration along with News Corporation security.

Although no disruptions are expected, you may wish to contact any visitors or appointments you are expecting this afternoon and suggest they allow additional time for processing. If you are booking car service this afternoon, request pick up on 48th Street.

We also encourage employees to use the alternate entrances at the back of the building and on the C-1 level if the main entrance becomes congested. As a reminder, it is always recommended that you NOT display your building ID card once outside of 1211. This is particularly important when arriving and departing the building during the demonstration.

If you have any questions or concerns, please contact Corporate Security Manager Lee Boody through the Security Operations Center at [redacted].

Karl Solterer
Vice President, Corporate Security
News Corporation

[Pic via]

That's them in the tiny pen in the middle.

"The dude is a very anti-birther friend who could not resist the opportunity."

Sandra Guzman was an editor at the Post charged with running, among other things, a section aimed at Latino readers. After the paper published a Sean Delonas cartoon depicting President Barack Obama as a chimpanzee being gunned down by white police officers, she complained internally about what she saw as the paper's persistent and overt racism under the leadership of Australian he-man Col Allan. Then she got fired.

Yesterday, she filed a complaint in federal court alleging systematic racism in the Post's hiring, firing, and editorial practices, and depicting Allan as a stupid, giggling frat-boy who likes to show his female employees pictures of naked men for kicks. The complaint has all sorts of damning allegations—you can read the whole thing here, but some of the good bits are below. Guzman has separately filed a complaint against the Post with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. The lawsuit comes just one day after the paper fired reporter Austin Fenner, one of the few remaining African-American reporters on the paper's staff—we're told there are just three others, one of whom has been on an extended sick leave for most of the year. We're also told that the paper—a metro daily in New York City—has no African-American editors, and hasn't for nine years. UPDATE: A tipster points out Robert George, an editor on the Post's editorial page, is an African American. Our sources on the Post's demographics were thinking of the news and features pages.

SECOND UPDATE: According to two other tipsters, business editor Jay Sherman is an African American as well. For the record, we asked a rep for the Post about the paper's demographics, and got an e-mailed statement, printed below, in response.

We've contacted the Post to confirm that and for a response to Guzman's complaint, and we'll publish it when we get one.

Here are some of the allegations:

The Post, Guzman says, was a "hostile work environment" for women and non-white staffers, who are subject to "pervasive and systemic discrimination" and "harassment":

Allan's "inappropriate and sexist comments and conduct have been widely known throughout" the Post. For instance, he likes to show ladies what penises look like. He thinks it's funny!

He also, Guzman says, likes to rub his penis up against his female employees, whether they want him to or not:

Other editors at the paper, following Allan's classy lead, have taken to offering female staffers better jobs in exchange for blow jobs:

Allan's colleague Les Goodstein, a News Corp. senior vice president, thinks latin ladies are hot, and told Guzman so. He also liked to lick his lips while staring at other women's breasts in her presence:

The beef that precipitated Guzman's firing was over a drawing by Sean Delonas, a racist, gay-hating, and—worst of all—astoundingly humorless cartoonist. The Barack-Obama-Is-a-Dead-Chimp cartoon is not his first exceedingly tasteless offering, and at one point, Guzman says, Delonas had the bright idea of depicting Jews as sewer rats, a pitch that apparently got nixed:

Guzman's complaints about the cartoon fell on deaf ears, both because real men don't care about whiny P.C. minority-type people and because she just didn't get that the whole point of the New York Post is to "destroy Barack Obama." At least that's what she says the paper's Washington bureau chief told her:

Col Allan certainly didn't care about P.C. minority-type people: When some of them staged a protest outside his newspaper, he laughed at them because "most of them are minorities and the majority are uneducated." Unlike the Post's highly sophisticated, Sean Delonas-loving readership:

Allan felt the same way about the vanishingly small number of non-white employees he oversees. When one of them approached him to discuss his feelings about the cartoon, Allan simply walked away:

After Guzman made her feelings public in an e-mail stating that she had raised her objections to the cartoon to management—an e-mail that got picked up by the Huffington Post and other blogs—Allan, she says, launched a crusade against her. His animus, according to Guzman, overwhelmed his news judgment. In August, Guzman—who is a personal friend of Justice Sonia Sotomayor—was invited as a guest to a White House reception celebrating Sotomayor's confirmation. No other reporters were to be present. Guzman asked for permission to cover and report on the event, and Allan said no. Granted, her personal relationship and status as a guest would make such an assignment weird, but a) it could have been disclosed and presented as an insider account, and b) since when has the Post cared about conflicts of interest? Especially when they have a chance to get an exclusive about a highly newsworthy event? Of all the transgressions listed in Guzman's complaint, this is perhaps the most shocking—that Allan let his hatred of Obama, Sotomayor, and Guzman kill a potential scoop.

There's much more, so do read the complaint in its entirety. We're sure Rupert Murdoch will, using his sophisticated racism-detecting system to determine that Guzman is full of it. Because if Glenn Beck's not a racist, then Col Allan certainly isn't, right?

UPDATE: The Post has released a statement responding to the complaint.

This lawsuit has no merit and is based on charges that are groundless. As previously stated, Ms. Guzman's position was eliminated when the section she edited was discontinued due to a decline in advertising sales.

According to a story in the New York Times today (in which the NYT tries very hard to suppress its glee), the Post's circulation has fallen by 30% in less than three years, to just a hair over half a million; and its financial losses were around $70 million last year, making the paper an expensive habit even by Rupert Murdoch's standards. And the fact that Rupert's adding local reporting to the WSJ makes Post reporters (reasonably) nervous they're falling out of favor.

We must not let this perpetually money-losing right-wing tabloid fall from grace! New York would be such a boring newspaper city without a loud, drunk voice of opposition. A few helpful suggestions:

• Andrea Peyser's sexxxy, but is she sexxxy enough? Millions of people in New York have sex every day without being mentioned in Andrea Peyser's column. Work on that.
• Col Allan is drunk, but is he drunk enough? Secretly rig the water fountains to emit gin, if you haven't done so already.
• Sean Delonas is racist, but is he racist enough? Racist cartoons are all well and good, but try upping Sean's visibility by getting him out there on the street, among the people, beating up minorities, then quick-sketching it on a blog. After he's all done promoting his children's book.

• As earning seasons reporting continued, NewsCorp came out on the winning side of the ledger, with profits up 11 percent in the past quarter with the picture for broadcast turning around. "The best results we've seen in seven quarters," is how Rupert Murdoch described the broadcast numbers. The company's dark cloud in the cheer: MySpace, which is failing to meet the deliverables in its deal with Google. "With MySpace, we are in a state of transition," was how NewsCorp's CEO described the once mighty social networking site's search for a new raison d'etre. And you know how those states of transition go online...[Variety]

• Taking those numbers with others from this earnings season, The Wrap is ready to call it a "media rebound." [The Wrap]

• Just when he seemed to be getting a head of steam on a good post-Oscar win bout of paralysis and indecision, one of Hollywood's finest traditions, director Danny Boyle has cut the party short by announcing his next film. And what could be a more obvious story to tell than 127 Hours, the true tale of a hiker trapped under a boulder who eventually cuts his arm off to escape? [Variety]

• The troubled pre-season of The Tourist may now have a A list team attached. Johnny Depp is in talks to star opposite Angelina Jolie in the film. Earlier star Sam Worthington and director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck both removed themselves from the project over "creative differences." [Variety]

• Continuing the Jackson watch, the movie has thus far brought in $125 million internationally. [The Wrap
]

• Disney has settled the lawsuit brought against it by the makers of the Luxo Jr. lamp that has become the Pixar trademark. Rather than celebrating the celebrity brought to it by its high profile association, the Swedish company that manufactures Luxo sued for trademark infringement after Pixar included copies of the lamp in special editions of the Up dvd's, saying Pixar's unauthorized use of their product would "cause devastating damage to Luxo and dilute the goodwill which Luxo has built up." [Hollywood Reporter]

Brian Stelter reports in today's New York Times that Fox Business is hoping to simulcast Imus' utterly unlistenable radio show in the same way MSNBC did before they fired him after the "nappy-headed hoes" incident involving the Rutgers women's basketball team a couple of years ago.

Stelter says that the deal is in "advanced negotiations" and that Fox hopes Imus' shitty program can be effective at "motivating new viewers to turn on the hard-to-find network for the first time." The show would reportedly run from 6 to 9am, replacing a show that currently doesn't garner enough viewers to even register a rating by Nielsen, and the idea seems to follow a blueprint for success that Fox has used effectively in the past.

In turning to Mr. Imus to bolster Fox Business, the News Corporation is taking a page from the playbook of its sibling channel Fox News, which now drives the company's financial growth. Fox, founded 13 years ago, successfully translated talk radio values to TV, sometimes by directly hiring radio talkers like Sean Hannity. Already, Fox Business counts two radio veterans, Dave Ramsey and Tom Sullivan, as hosts.

Well it's about time! Seriously, have there ever been two entities more perfect for each other than Don Imus and Fox?

Citing high "impairment and operating charges" the company incurred through its ownership of MySpace, News Corp. shareholders lost 8 cents per share and the company lost 11% of its total revenue in their fourth quarter. So it probably shouldn't come as a surprise that Murdoch would announce plans to end free access to all of his company's online offerings on the same day.

Reports the Financial Times:

Rupert Murdoch has vowed to charge for all the online content of his newspapers and television news channels, going well beyond his prediction in May that the company would test pay models on one of its stronger papers within the year.

"We intend to charge for all our news websites," Mr Murdoch said.

"If we're successful, we'll be followed by all media," he added, predicting "significant revenues" from charging for differentiated news online.

He warned that "the big competition will be coming from the BBC," which offers online news for free, but said: "Our policy is to win."

Murdoch's move, if he holds fast to his plans, could play a substantial role in the future of content availability on the internet. While charging for online access to the Wall Street Journal has been mildly successful due to the willingness of the paper's affluent readership to pony up, it'll be interesting to see if the same holds true for New Corp.'s other, less "classy" properties. If his move to force people to pay for access to Glenn Beck, Bill O'Reilly, the News of the World, the New York Post, etc. is successful, expect many others to follow suit, something sure to please David Simon. However, this idea sure as shit seems to have fail written all over it.

Pic via

To summarize: Greenwald goes over the New York Times' revelation of a Charlie Rose-officiated summit between News Corp and GE chiefs that ended the battle between their respective professional blowhards, Fox News' Bill O'Reilly and MSNBC's Keith Olbermann. The battle embarrassed their corporate parents, and that's why the beef was squashed. He notes that the Times' Brian Stelter, who penned the piece, missed the big picture in all of this: that we now shamelessly live in an age where corporations can control their news divisions simply by getting a few guys in a room, and ordering them to stop fighting. Which is absolutely true, but we already knew that. He's right, however, in its absolute shamelessness. Even Charlie Rose, who brought the corporate titans together, is dirty. Even better, Greenwald pulls from an old interview of Charlie Rose's. In conversation with reporter and columnist Amy Goodman, Rose noted:

I promise you, CBS News and ABC News and NBC News are not influenced by the corporations that may own those companies. Since I know one of them very well and worked for one of them.

Which is great, coming from the guy who just moderated a meeting of two corporate giants who need to reign in their news networks.

But when not pointing out the long-kvetched, now manifest complaints of anarchists everywhere, he gets to something even more insidious: former Newsweek reporter Richard Wolffe's guest stint on MSNBC, filling in for Keith Olbermann. Wolffe is noted as a "political analyst" when he appears on MSNBC. Which is funny, because his day job is for a corporate strategies firm run by the former Bush White House Comm Director Dan Bartlett:

Wolffe left Newsweek last March in order to join "Public Strategies, Inc.," the corporate communications firm run by (Bartlett), its President and CEO...

...Having Richard Wolffe host an MSNBC program — or serving as an almost daily "political analyst" — is exactly tantamount to MSNBC's just turning over an hour every night to a corporate lobbyist

Hot damn. He also goes on to note those who've previously written about MSNBC and Wolffe's lack of disclosure over this (Ana Marie Cox), and links to Public Strategies' website. Want to know what one of their divisions is? This is neat:

Media Intelligence™

The Situation

A leading media company faced negative public perception and sagging stock prices resulting from a personal legal situation involving its CEO. Senior Management engaged Public Strategies to reposition the company as a trusted, respected, and innovative leader in its industry, and to help mitigate the crisis and restore confidence in the brand.

Public Strategies' solution

In addition to providing strategic counsel, Public Strategies immediately responded by enacting its Media Intelligence™ service providing the client with a 360-degree perspective of public opinion around the globe

A "360-degree perspective," and a four-dimensional one, too, like A CALL THAT COMES FROM INSIDE THE HOUSE. Furthermore: he points out how Wolffe has gone on the record to a Newsweek reporter after announcing his departure from the weekly as not giving a shit about the line between corporate interests and news. And get ready to walk away from your computer, because you might want to break something:

"The idea that journalists are somehow not engaged in corporate activities is not really in touch with what's going on. Every conversation with journalists is about business models and advertisers," he said, recalling that, on the day after the 2008 election, Newsweek sent him to Detroit to deliver a speech to advertisers. "You tell me where the line is between business and journalism," he said.

Jesus.

At least former MSNBC correspondent, the (potentially) conflict-of-interest-happy Dan Abrams, tries to run interference on the inherent conflicts between owning a media strategies firm Abrams Research and owning a media reporting website Mediaite (or at least: has henchpeople furiously sending emails, telling everyone writing about them to get their facts right).

The kicker, however, is when Greenwald points out Wolffe's bio on the Public Strategies website, where they actually tout him as a news source: "In addition, Wolffe is an NBC political analyst. He provides political commentary on several MSNBC programs, Meet The Press, and TODAY."

As in, in addition to being our employee, we can send him into the field to say whatever you want him to say! For a price, of course. There's clearly a very small difference in being able to pay to put something in someone's mouth, and being able to pay to get something out of someone's mouth in front of a bunch of other people. Richard Wolffe is about as dirty and shameless a media whore as you can get, taking money from corporations, going on the news with his pockets lined by said interests, and being framed in a context as an objective, righteous news commentator. Richard Wolffe, and by extension, MSNBC, are completely - and I guess, at this point - unexpectedly dirty, and pretty much nothing they claim to be and everything they don't.

Glenn Greenwald, on the other hand? You deserve something. I don't know. A steak dinner. A stiff drink. But mostly, lots of people to read your column. It's nice to see someone who's not answering to the interest of brass somewhere, which, apparently, is becoming more and more rare as we move forward in this great new era of news, or whatever we're eventually going to call it.

GE's silencing of Olbermann and MSNBC's sleazy use of Richard Wolffe [Salon]

Rupert Murdoch's son James personally authorized a $1.1 million our-of-court settlement payment to Gordon Taylor, the CEO of the Professional Footballers' Association, after Taylor found out last year his phone had been illegally hacked by the Murdoch tabloid News of the World. Rupert Murdoch himself has said he had no idea this whole phone-tapping business, or the associated payoffs, were going on. Hmm. That seems to appear ever less likely.

The latest volley in the gentlemanly WSJ vs. NYT newspaper wars:

New York Times bonds, like many these days, are signaling substantial risk. The March 2015 notes are yielding 11%, or more than four times as much as "risk-free" bonds issued by the U.S. government. Anyone confident the Times can avoid bankruptcy within the next six years can simply borrow against their home at around 5.5%, invest the money at 11% and make themselves rich.
I wish them luck.

Oh yea? Well watch how you eat your words, WSJ, when...somebody else tries this. Anybody?

Everybody was worried that NBC's show "The Wanted," a laughable version of "To Catch a Predator" focused on catching terrorists or some shit, would irrevocably blur the lines of journalistic ethics and hurt NBC's "credibility," etc. Well, its premiere last night "was the least watched program on broadcast TV," so it's a moot point.

Here's an amusing little thing: Incisive Media boss Bill Pollak has a blog. The bureau chief from GlobeSt.com got called to active military duty in Afghanistan, so Pollak interviewed him, for the blog. His finest question: "I also couldn't help asking if he had anything to report about commercial real estate in Kabul for the benefit of his GlobeSt colleagues." Uhh. The response: "Well, I guess you could say that the occupancy could use some growth. It's at about 0%." Heh.

Gawker has learned that Hinton will not be hopping across the pond to help explain revelations that reporters for the News of the World and the Sun, two Murdoch papers under his purview when he ran News International Group, engaged in rampant wiretapping and that News International paid off victims to the tune of $1.6 million in exchange for their silence.

The wiretapping scandals first broke in 2007, when Hinton was running News International. After News of the World royal editor Clive Goodman was convicted of tapping the phones of various royals and their entourages, Hinton told the House of Commons' culture committee that he had thoroughly investigated the charges and assured Parliament that Goodman was acting alone. Last week, the Guardian reported that nearly 30 News of the World and Sun reporters were engaged in wiretapping and other invasions of privacy.

According to the *ahem* Wall Street Journal, the committee has invited Hinton back to explain the discrepancy:

A parliamentary committee that monitors media policy — the lower house committee on culture, media and sport — plans to hold hearings into the matter as early as Tuesday. The committee has invited Les Hinton, the current chief executive of Dow Jones and the former head of News Corp.'s U.K. newspaper operations, to give evidence. A spokesman for Mr. Hinton declined to comment.

Hinton won't be taking them up on the offer, a source tells Gawker. Tomorrow, the committee will begin hearings on the affair with testimony from an editor and reporter for the Guardian, which broke the story.

The new allegations had their roots in a 2007 incident in which one of Murdoch's tabloid editors at News of the World, along with a private investigator named Glen Mulcaire, were jailed for illegally hacking into cell phones associated with the royal family. But the phone tapping was much bigger—look who else was a victim:

The BBC has learned that Rebekah Wade, the editor of the Sun, a sister paper of the News of the World, was among 75 people identified by police as having had phone messages monitored by Mulcaire.
Ms Wade - soon to become chief executive of the papers' parent company News International - was informed at the time but declined to press charges, according to BBC business editor Robert Peston.

Yes: one of Murdoch's tabloids was tapping the phone of the editor of another of Murdoch's tabloids, allegedly. It's roughly the equivalent of...well there really is no US equivalent. And you better believe an American editor would be pressing some god damn charges, then perhaps buying some guns. Or at least complaining loudly.

It's truly incredible. And now Rebekah Wade (pictured) is the boss of the entire paper that spied on her! News Corp., ladies and gentlemen. It's not a job—it's a way of life.
[BBC, Previously. Pic: Getty]