murdoch

U.S. shareholders of News Corp are not happy at all over the Murdoch empires handling of the phone hacking scandal.

Shareholders called it "inconceivable" that directors were not aware sooner of the questionable news practices that led to the closure of the News of the World tabloid, given that news of the hackings first surfaced in 2005.

This, the shareholders said, reflects a board that "provides no effective review or oversight," in a corporate culture "run amuck," according to the amended complaint dated July 8 and filed in Delaware Chancery Court. Lawyers for the shareholders provided a copy of the complaint on Monday.

I believe this story is as much about politics as it is media. For years the left has accused Fox and their parent company, News Corp, of engaging in questionable practices, yet the Fox defenders on the right would instantly denounce those claims as some conspiracy theory. Now as Murdoch's British empire crumbles in a wrath of corruption and illegal activities, maybe we can start looking more closely at exactly what is happening here in the U.S.

It all started early in this week. On the front page of Drudge was a big story saying that President Obama’s India trip would cost $200 million per day. By the next day it was being pushed by the GOP:

However, instead of answering that question, Bachmann wanted to talk about President Obama's upcoming trip to India -- and the insane amount of money he's spending each day.

"Well I think we know that just within a day or so the President of the United States will be taking a trip over to India that is expected to cost the taxpayers $200 million a day," Bachmann said. "He's taking two thousand people with him. He'll be renting out over 870 rooms in India. And these are 5-star hotel rooms at the Taj Mahal Palace hotel. This is the kind of over-the-top spending, it's a very small example, Anderson."

What Drudge did was post a link to some obscure India news outlet. Without fact checking it, Michele Bachmann takes the false story and runs with it. Here’s what a little fact checking would have shown:

Snopes.com, a website devoted to myth busting, noted that even if the Indian press has correctly reported the size of the president’s entourage – 3,000 – the cost would work out to $66,000 per person per day, “a figure that stretches credulity to the breaking point.” Factcheck.org noted that the entire war in Afghanistan costs $190 million a day.

Well this is certainly going to leave some tea baggers in tears:

FoxNews commentator Sean Hannity has cancelled his appearance and broadcast at a Tea Party rally at Fifth Third Arena.

Hannity planned to tape his television show from the event, which starts at 6 p.m. at the University of Cincinnati.

Organizers of the rally said there were technical issues, but that the overriding factor for the cancellation was a personal matter that Hannity needed to attend to in New York.

WLWT was the first to report that there were issues when Hannity failed to appear at a book signing at 4:30 p.m. Minutes later, Hannity's bus was seen leaving the campus.

He failed to appear at the book signing and now won’t be doing his show tonight? Oh my inquisitive little mind is going a mile a minute right now.

UPDATE

This little juicy bit from the LA Times:

Angry Fox News executives ordered host Sean Hannity to abandon plans to broadcast his nightly show as part of a Tea Party rally in Cincinnati on Thursday after top executives learned that he was set to headline the event, proceeds from which would benefit the local Tea Party organization.

Maybe Rupert made a call to them?

UPDATE II:

The more I think about this, the more I believe the legal people at Fox probably weren’t to happy with Hannity doing this. He is essentially using FOX News as an outlet to raise money for the Tea Party, and that could spell some trouble with the FCC and FEC. I honestly wouldn’t be surprised if this leads to the end of Hannity on Fox. Yeah Murdoch is a wingnut, but more than that he is a business man.

Image by Eric Schmidt / Google via CrunchBase

Eric Schmidt, the head cheese of Google, has written a lengthy article appearing in the Murdoch owned Wall Street Journal. In the piece Schmidt not only clarifies the distortions Murdoch has been laying out these past few weeks, but also what Google is doing to help the news industry.

First off here is Schmidt talking about Murdoch’s claims:

Google is a great source of promotion. We send online news publishers a billion clicks a month from Google News and more than three billion extra visits from our other services, such as Web Search and iGoogle. That is 100,000 opportunities a minute to win loyal readers and generate revenue—for free. In terms of copyright, another bone of contention, we only show a headline and a couple of lines from each story. If readers want to read on they have to click through to the newspaper's Web site. (The exception are stories we host through a licensing agreement with news services.) And if they wish, publishers can remove their content from our search index, or from Google News.

The claim that we're making big profits on the back of newspapers also misrepresents the reality. In search, we make our money primarily from advertisements for products. Someone types in digital camera and gets ads for digital cameras. A typical news search—for Afghanistan, say—may generate few if any ads. The revenue generated from the ads shown alongside news search queries is a tiny fraction of our search revenue.

That is exactly what I have been saying all along. Google isn’t “stealing content”, they are simply indexing very small tidbits of it so people can easily find it, and they do find it at a rate of one billion per month. I don’t think that’s something any serious news publisher would want to turn away.

According to a report in the Financial Times, Microsoft has approached News Corp. about de-listing their sites from Google, which would be an apparent escalation in the search engine wars.

It appears that Microsoft isn’t limiting this to just News Corp either. It’s reported that they are approaching numerous online publishers and offering to pay them for content if they delist from Google. One publisher approached by Microsoft said this is all about “Microsoft hurting Google’s margin”.

Microsoft’s new search engine Bing is their latest attempt to give Google a run for the money. Here are the October search engine market shares, and as you can see Microsoft has a long way to go to beat out Google:

Bing has increased at the same rate that Google has, but what is interesting is that it appears their shares are coming from Yahoo. In July of this year Microsoft and Yahoo entered a deal for Yahoo to use the Bing search engine on their sites in exchange for a split on advertising revenue, so Yahoo’s decrease in the market share also directly effects Microsoft.

This is really starting to catch on and take a toll on the Murdoch empire:

Big news today. We've confirmed that eight more major advertisers have pulled their support from Glenn Beck's show -- Wal-Mart, Best Buy, CVS, Travelocity, Allergan (maker of Restasis), Ally Bank, Broadview Security, and Re-Bath.

Overall, twenty advertisers have now ended their support of Beck. We're going to keep the pressure on Beck's remaining advertisers this week, and we'll let you know how you can help.

Of course the wingnuts are up in arms over this, acting as though what’s happening is some kind of major Obama conspiracy. True the right never went after advertisers or anything like that – just ask the Dixie Chicks.

Good for them:

"On Tuesday, August 4, GEICO instructed its ad buying service to redistribute its inventory of rotational spots on FOX-TV to their other network programs, exclusive of the Glenn Beck program," said a spokesperson for GEICO Corporate Communications in an email to ColorOfChange.org.  "As of August 4, GEICO no longer runs any paid advertising spots during Mr. Beck's program."

"We applaud GEICO and all of the other companies who have stepped forward to pull their ads from Glenn Beck," said James Rucker, executive director of ColorOfChange.org. "Beck's rhetoric is dangerous to the fabric of our democracy, and we are heartened that so many big companies feel the same way. We won't stop here -- we're going to continue our fight to see that as many of Beck's advertisers pull their support as possible."

Murdoch has been making a lot of news lately talking about losing money and how the media has to change. Will he continue to employ a fanatic that is now costing him money? Also I am sure the right will start screaming about this and associating it to some for of communism, when in fact it is the very definition of democracy and capitalism. Just wanted to throw that out there before the idiots start trying to say its not.