Ruptert Murdoch media magnate meltdown makes superior social web subject
While Murdoch's media organization does not strike me as a social web powerhouse, a couple other news media sites do seem extraordinarily adroit at it. Guardian, the UK newspaper site is one of them.
A lot of social web media seem well-suited to efficiently distribute the latest news of his conglomerate's rapidly melting ass. It's like an iceberg that has suddenly found itself in a dessert.
Google Docs is being used to track the list of victims, as each one steps forward or is publically announced by the police.
Twitter is being used to call for boycotts. Evidently, tripping up the police search for an 11-old girl kidnapped by a rapist causes advertisements to work in reverse, when placed in the responsible newspaper's pages.
YouTube already holds a raft of videos showing the management and the mogul himself. Also, some web pages show Murdoch managers self-contridtory statements strung together. You can also see Murdoch snapping at his unfortunate Fox News anchor that he will not speak about this matter.
Glenn Beck left Fox week before last. The boycott of his show's advertisers was enacted after he started effecting a lot of Hitlter-like qualities, growing increasingly erratic.
Apparently, there is a motif now where when part of Murdoch's media organization does something unconscionable, consumers undertake steps to boycott its advertisers and then he saws that part off like a gangrenous limb.
Now, the fiasco in the UK is like a snowball growing each day.
It already has Murdoch resembling Conservative's politician's adored icon Richard M. "I am not a crook" Nixon. Appropriately, it seems like legal investigations will drag out through the summer just as they did with Watergate four decades ago. People have dubbed this much more large scale espionage operation "RupertGate".
Ironically, whereas Nixon fired US Attorney Generals that intended to investigate him, Murdoch -- possibly realizing the irony as he did so -- has lawyered up by hiring himself an ex US Attorney General.
The RupertGate monicker is particularly fitting also because he and those of his managers who have lately been wrapped up in discussions with the police this week, un-bribed ones this time one hopes -- seem to make a point of expressing very Nixon-ian points of view when a camera is rolling on them.
It is also fitting that while Nixon himself allegedly erased 18 minutes of audio tape which recorded discussions in his White House office, a News International executive reportedly deleted a staggering number of emails to their office. Then, they were pretty much ordered to report it to police by a data management company. I guess they did not want to be a party to a Nixon-like cover-up, being kind of illegal to do and all.
The summer long saga is repeating itself. This time the transgressions are far more sweeping. It looks like more people were corrupted. It seems like there were far, far more direct victims this time as well. Not to mention a whole country betrayed again.
It is clear that modern web features will be used to closely follow, analyze, and report Murdoch's summer-long descent into... well, where big things melt really quickly. Just this past week, it was announced that there was a good deal more brimstone in the lower atmosphere than was previously expected.
Now we know why.
posted by John Collins at 1:31 AM
1 Comments:
This article says Rupert Murdoch is an anachronism, a media man who cannot understand the web and barely uses Internet technology himself.
Rupert Murdoch's pathetic paywall
I expect he is counting heavily on Apple iOS device users buying subscriptions to digital editions of his news rags
I think Apple users will go out of their way not to subscribe to news from an organization that boasts of espionage against more politicians than nixon, bribing cops while claiming the public wanted to cut police pensions, and frustrated police efforts to investigate the kidnapping of a little 11-year old girl who was raped and killed.
That is the work of a crime syndicate, not a news conglomerate.
When we hear of a rape, kidnapping, or killing of a little girl, we are going to think of News Corp. When we hear of some shady underworld character bribing police and corrupting them for the rest of their careers until they quite or go to jail, we will think of Murdoch. When we hear some executive whose group has been accused of harming the public claiming he did it to protect the public, we will think of Ruper's managers.
When we think of those workers laid off to suit the whims of a less than honest company, we will think of 200 unemployed people. People that were laid off in a gambit. A gambit based on the idea we would want to read trash about people by an organization that steals information from people like us who do not want to be killed, or raped, or robbed.
It is more than a little insulting, really
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