We cannot even find the original item. Just this piece in the Sydney Morning Herald referencing and more or less refuting it. Michael Wolff, quoted in the SMH story, did not even picked it up for Newser.

But Drudge now announces, just below the screaming climate conference "news," that those rumors—which never made it out of Australia, and were barely even noticed there—are totally untrue.

Which is a great way to get those rumors out there!

But what would Matt Drudge, Conservative New Media Superstar, have against Murdoch, Conservative Old Media Baron? Well, a lot of Drudge's favorite content comes from News Corp newspapers, and Rupert doesn't want anyone to read anything from those papers anymore on the internet, which is where Drudge lives.

So this is maybe a really passive aggressive way of tweaking Murdoch before he goes all-in on paywalls?

And, in not linking to or explaining anything, Matt has caused a million readers to turn to Rupert's second-least favorite website: Google. (His least fave is obviously MySpace.)

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.

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.

That's bad news not only for News Corp. chairman Murdoch but also for all the other old media barons hoping online paywalls will save their bacon. Even those who will pay can't decide if they want to buy individual articles via micropayments, subscribe to print-online bundles or subscribe to just the website:

Then there's the anecdotal evidence collected by Ad Age's Simon Dumenco, who surfed the comments section of Murdoch's websites and found that most of his own readers thought his paywall would fail. Some were downright mean, like Times of London reader Robin Stack: "It will reduce your wealth and influence; please do it."

So, in order to have any hope of weaning consumers off free content, the likes of Murdoch will have to offer a diverse array of payment plans and work like hell to change the thinking of the vast majority of his existing audience. For moguls used to exploiting their readers' and viewers' basest instincts, that sounds like an awful lot of persuading.

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."

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.

That's basically what he told his employee in a Sky News Interview, excerpted above:

Q: You could choose not to be on their search engine... so when someone runs a search your websites won't come up.


A: Well, I think we will... when we start charging.

This is certainly technically possible; all it takes is one correctly-placed text file to tell Google to ignore some or all of a website. And who knows, Murdoch's armies of lawyers and lobbyists might even succeed in effecting the other drastic change he mentioned: rolling back the entire doctrine of fair use, an interpretation of copyright law that allows the sort of quoting and selective reproduction of content that Murdoch's newspapers and TV networks engage in every day.

This isn't the first time Murdoch, 78, and his lieutenants have been made unfriendly noises about Google; they've recently attacked the search engine as a "parasite" with "promiscuous" users. This hostility must seem perfectly sensible if you're an old man who has your secretary find and print up Web pages on your behalf. But here's a pro tip, Rupert: Old media doesn't instant message those pages to your assistant's Twitter, via Blogger, on AOL. She just does what your newspaper reporters and Fox News producers and sales executives and tabloid editors and attack-dog flacks and mid-level accountants do all the time every day: Sticks a hot, throbbing search query into Google and gets busy with a bunch of strange website she doesn't subscribe to. Welcome to the internet.

The Georgian mansion in Sydney suburb Belleview Hill certainly has a belle view indeed, looking out on Sydney harbor and the Pacific Ocean. It's 4,100 square meters spread out over six bedrooms, two studies, five bathrooms, multiple living rooms, and even a three-car garage.

Let's take a look inside, shall we?

[Images via Domain.au]

The outside of the house.
The grounds including the swimming pool.
This is the view the paparazzi will get skulking in the bushes.
One of the studies.
A lovely living room.
The main staircase.
Looks like someone needs to mow the tennis court!
The lawn in the back yard looks much nicer.
That's quite a patio view.
The view of the harbor.
Aerial shot of the grounds.

Murdoch and his Fox News Channel monsters like Roger Ailes and Bill O'Reilly love to frame their fight with Olbermann and his network MSNBC as petty personal bickering. Of course they do; that creates a false equivalency between the two sides. Here's what Murdoch said on a conference call for Fox parent News Corp. the other day, according to the New York Times' Brian Stelter:

Mr. Murdoch pointed a finger at MSNBC, saying "we did not start this abuse." But he said the fighting became "personal" and "finally we had to allow people to retaliate... The moment they stop, we'll stop... We don't believe in it. We don't think it's good business."

So, let's review this supposedly "personal" fighting.

Olbermann has:

• Built a profitable career on taunting Fox News for various falsehoods spread by the right-leaning cable network, in statements made by Fox News staffers on actual television broadcasts;
• Sometimes, in the course of doing this, labeled people "The Worst Person in the World" on his show.

Fox and its corporate siblings have, as part of this feud:

• Suddenly accused the CEO of MSNBC parent GE of being personally at fault for the deaths of U.S. soldiers in Iraq, since GE sold medical equipment to Iran (legally), and Iran later supplied Iraqi insurgents;
• Ambushed said CEO, Jeffrey Immelt, for an interview over this invented issue, in Fox's infamous, stalkery manner;
• Ran stale and obviously retaliatory gossip stories that Olbermann mistreats his colleagues and might leave his network;
• Gossiped that Olbermann disrespected his dead colleague's funeral;
• Wrote that people in gyms throughout New York City have complained that "TVs tuned to... Keith Olbemrann" are as disgusting as "pooping in the pool" and "sex in the showers."

Having responded to a debate about the quality of its television news broadcast with trumped up and/or utterly petty unrelated personal assertions, Fox News is now trying to make the narrative about how the whole fight is about petty personal bickering by TV anchors with overgrown egos. And it's actually succeeding, on days when said anchors don't carefully document, with pictures, that they have no personal beef. It doesn't help Olbermann's case that he does in fact, have a hugely overgrown ego, regularly put on display. So he might just end up getting muzzled by his GE overlords, for the terrible "personal" fight he started.

• 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]

Sterling's seemingly meandering and occasionally infuriating talk at the annual Reboot digital culture conference in Copenhagen, Denmark this year attracted some notice, originally, but deserves a wider hearing, if only for his contextualization of Steve Jobs and Nicolas Sarkozy as gothic figures and his advocacy on behalf of expensive beds. Luckily, protoblogger Dave Winer recently re-uploaded and linked the talk.

Observers of the social networking wars should listen to Sterling's rundown on "favela chic," excerpted above. Rupert Murdoch, familial overlord of MySpace parent News Corp., is cast as the "remote, distanct, old-school Brazilian tyrant," while MySpace accounts are likened to "huts." Who knows: Maybe when you lose your job, an anonymous space in News Corp.'s online hellscape might start sounding a lot more fun than the prim, proper — and all-too-accountable — playground that is Facebook.

(Sterling pic: Daniel Barradas)

• Rupert Murdoch is still willing to pour money into the New York newspaper wars, "decline of the newspaper industry" be damned. He will not rest until he can claim superiority over the NYT as a general interest paper in the NYC market. Or he will die trying, literally!
• People most likely to be angry about this: The WSJ's Boston bureau, which was recently closed.
• People who should be most worried about this: New York Post staffers. Every dollar Rupert puts into the WSJ is a dollar that he's not putting into the Post. Which already has very good local coverage, in a vile tabloidy way.
• People who may view this news with keen interest: The 100 New York Times newsroom staffers who have to be gone by the end of the year. "Hiring," you say?

Reuters says both Murdoch and Liberty Media's John Malone are sniffing around the 20 percent stake in NBC Universal that Vivendi is prepared to sell, but neither man has actually approached NBC Universal owner GE about a deal. As much as we'd love to imagine MSNBC under Murdoch's gentle-but-firm leadership, here's why it's not going to happen:

1. The report of Murdoch's interest comes via CNBC, which is the preferred in-house avenue for GE getting its messages out there on this deal. So it's almost certainly just a way for GE to keep pressure on Comcast and let them know that it has other options.

2. The FCC would blow a gasket. News Corp. already owns two television stations in nine markets, and is maxed out in terms of how many the FCC will let him own. It's unclear to us whether a minority stake in NBC Universal would trigger the FCC's limits on ownership and require Murdoch to sell off some of his assets in order to satisfy regulators, but the anti-trust implications of one television, cable, and movie giant owning a significant stake of another television, cable, and movie giant—especially when radical leftists control the White House and the Justice Department—make it a far stretch.

3. The Comcast purchase is a done deal, because the mellifluously named prognosticator Bruce Bueno de Mesquita's computer has ordained that it will happen. Bueno de Mesquita, whom the CIA hires to predict the future using Microsoft Excel and has a purported 90 percent accuracy rate, was asked by the Wall Street Journal's Dennis K. Berman to weigh in on the acquisition, and he says it will happen, based on what Berman told him about the players' intentions:

For the Comcast-NBCU game, I provided Dr. Bueno de Mesquita a crude approximation of the positions of the dozen parties most likely to influence a deal.

[snip]

Of course, these were rough estimates done on the fly. As Dr. Bueno de Mesquita reminded me, my evaluations could be flawed. His work was done over a weekend, which may influence the quality of the results. Most assignments can take three weeks, at an opening price of $50,000.

Oh, OK. That settles it then.

In 2005, not long after News Corp. bought MySpace, when it still seemed like a brilliant purchase... I congratulated him on the acquisition. "Now," he said, "we're in the stalking business."

Later in his Vanity Fair column, Wolff recounts how Murdoch asked the founders of Google "Why don't you read newspapers?", gave "a walleyed stare" during all conversations about Web news and tried to beat Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg to death with his cane.

Kidding; even after buying MySpace, Murdoch was over the moon for Zuckerberg. He invited the founder to speak at a News Corp. executive retreat, huddled with him throughout dinner — sparking obvious jealousy in MySpace co-founder Chris DeWolfe — and soon declared people were "all going to Facebook at the moment" rather than MySpace. All this according to Julia Angwin's Stealing MySpace.

The point is, Rupert Murdoch has always kind of hated on MySpace, cruelly, in public.

(Pic: Murdoch and MySpace CEO DeWolfe at the opening of MySpace's San Francisco office in Oct. 2007. Getty Images.)