downward spiral

If anyone wonders why CNN is in such a downward spiral, they only need to look at this article to get an idea of why:

Oil slick awaits New Orleans' 1st white mayor in decades

The first white mayor of New Orleans in more than 30 years steps into his first challenge as soon as he takes office Monday: the massive oil slick that is creeping to his coast.

The fallout from a ruptured undersea well off Louisiana is spewing about 210,000 gallons (5,000 barrels) of crude a day into the Gulf of Mexico. And efforts to corral the rapidly growing oil spill have so far been unsuccessful.

The article is predominately focused on the oil spill, with only the first paragraph and this little bit about New Orleans news mayor:

Into this climate, steps Democrat Mitch Landrieu.

His city is still digging itself out from the wrath of Hurricane Katrina five years ago. And his state is the top producer of seafood -- and so, has a lot at stake from the spill's impact.

Landrieu -- who lost two previous mayoral bids in 1994 and 2006 -- replaces the term-limited Ray Nagin in a city where about two-thirds of the residents are black.

The city's last white mayor was Landrieu's father, Maurice "Moon" Landrieu, who left office in 1978. He is remembered fondly for desegregating the city, appointing African-Americans to positions of city leadership and opening up public facilities to blacks.

Last week, the younger Landrieu took part in a flyover of the spill for a first-hand look.

"As this situation becomes clearer, there are obvious environmental and health concerns, especially as it relates to Lake Pontchartrain, our coast, and our air quality," he said Thursday. "But, there is also an economic component of the utmost importance including the impact on our fisheries

I had almost forgot about this deal between Google and MySpace, a NewsCorp company. In 2006 the two entered into an agreement. Basically Google would get exclusive search advertising rights in exchange for $900 million over three years. MySpace also had to guarantee a minimum amount of traffic.

That was all three years ago and in the world of the internet, that is an eternity. Now things have changed. MySpace was one a thriving website, one of the best known. Today Facebook has taken the lead and MySpace is on a constant downward spiral.

That’s the deal and then there was this news last week:

MySpace, once the centerpiece of Rupert Murdoch’s digital strategy, has fallen “significantly” short of expectations and is jeopardising [sic] a critical $900m internet search agreement with Google.

Weaker traffic means the News Corp division is now expected to receive about $100m less from a deal that had underpinned investors’ confidence in the MySpace acquisition, executives revealed.

So because Murdoch’s company couldn’t live up to their end of the deal now he might be out some big bucks. Perhaps that is some motivation behind Murdoch singling out Google in his search engine rants. Murdoch is now saying that he will be pulling his content from Google in a matter of “months”. I don’t know why he wants to wait. Google has already stated he can do it now.