Robert Thomson Renews Attack on Content Aggregators
News Corporation chief executive Robert Thomson has renewed his attack on content aggregators, singling out Google for its disregard of copyright, and likened LinkedIn to “spam central”.
“We are living in the decade of content distribution, which is not necessarily good for the act of creation,” Mr Thomson said in a speech in Sydney last week.
As reported by The Newspaper Works, Mr Thomson said: “I am fortunate to be a custodian in a company that invests in thousands of creative acts around the world each day, great journalism, compelling analysis, feisty blogs, captivating videos and brilliant books, fiction and nonfiction.
“The question for this creationist is whether my views are anti-evolutionary or anti e-evolution — already a bit backward and sliding ever more so.
“For the distributionists do indeed have powerful distribution channels, Google and Facebook, and pretenders like LinkedIn, which is spam central.
“None of them actually create content, and they certainly have little intention of paying for it, but they do redistribute the content created by others — they would argue that such redistribution is a natural extension of their role as social networks.
“There are broader issues that are still unfolding for media companies, who are themselves struggling to profit from their news and other content, while the distributionists are helping themselves to that content, co-opting and corralling audiences and consciously devaluing brands.”
Mr Thomson said the world was entering a new phase of development by the big distribution networks, a phase in which they were not only appropriating content but deciding what content was appropriate and inappropriate.
“They are appointing editors not to create but to curate. And these curators tend to have a certain mindset, a deep fondness for political correctness, and a tendency to be intolerant of ideological infractions,” he said.
“Silicon Valley is moving from the PC to being a purveyor of the PC.
“This transition is already underway. The stream of content is often a flow of soft- left sensibility, a stream of content consciousness in which genuine debate is in danger of drowning and alternative views rarely surface. This profound movement is taking place, and without much serious discussion of the social consequences.
“Newspapers have always been a little unruly, but they are characterised by public debate, wrangling, haggling, arguing, sometimes passionately about issues and consequences, about the impact on societies and on people. The philosophy, the point of great newspapers is clear. But now we have the exponential growth of purportedly neutral platforms built by e-elites that will be far from neutral, far from objective, succumbing to a stultifyingly samey subjectivity and sensibility.”
He said there was a deficit in reporting resources created by the egregious aggregation of news by distributors for whom provenance was an inconvenience and who were contemptuous of copyright.
“The words Intellectual Property don’t appear in the Google alphabet. Without proper recognition, without proper remuneration, well-resourced reporting will be ever more challenged,” Mr Thomson said.
“In this age, I am proud to work for a company that has both an egalitarian ethos and a commitment to investing in journalism and in understanding.
“Without Rupert Murdoch, many people in this room would not be in fine surrounds celebrating the continued importance of journalism — we would be in the backroom at a dingy pub lamenting its passing.”