The Rupert Murdoch we all know and love (or love to hate) is an aggressive, insurgent media tycoon who prefers to fight against entrenched media forces and insult them while doing so.
The Rupert Murdoch we have seen in the past couple of years is a humble pussycat who says nice things about how News Corp has to learn to play nicely with the digital generation.
Thankfully, nasty Rupert seems to be back.
Mr Murdoch’s complaints about Google and news aggregators “stealing” stories from News Corp publications and not contributing to the expense of employing journalists has stirred things up thoroughly and made him once again a villain in many people’s eyes.
Peter Mandelson, the UK business secretary, has accused Mr Murdoch of trying to import Fox News style journalism to Britain while exerting an “iron grip” on pay television. Meanwhile, his threat to stop Google indexing his news stories has ruffled feathers.
Arianna Huffington, founder of the Huffington Post, told a hearing organised by the Federal Trade Commission in Washington this week:
Apparently, some in the old media have decided that . . . the best way to save, if not journalism, at least themselves, is by pointing fingers and calling names. It’s a tactic familiar to schoolyard inhabitants everywhere: when all else fails, reach for the nearest insult and throw it around indiscriminately.
Meanwhile, if you want to get a sense of the average Guardian reader’s view of Mr Murdoch, take a look at the comments on this report on his speech to the FTC gathering this week.
Jeff Jarvis, who was criticised by Les Hinton, publisher of Wall Street Journal, this week for advocating free access to news, disclosed this week that he had helped with a draft of Mr Murdoch’s 2005 speech on how the internet was changing the media industry.
Mr Murdoch said in that speech:
The challenge, however, is to deliver that news in ways consumers want to receive it. Before we can apply our competitive advantages, we have to free our minds of our prejudices and predispositions, and start thinking like our newest consumers.
It strikes me that Mr Murdoch feels a lot more comfortable attacking Google and organisations such as the Huffington Post, as he did this week:
Some rewrite – at times without attribution, the news stories of expensive and distinguished journalists who invested days, weeks, or even months in their stories – all under the tattered veil of “fair use.” These people are not investing in journalism. They are feeding off the hard-earned efforts and investments of others. And their almost wholesale misappropriation of our stories is not “fair use.” To be impolite, it’s theft.
Mr Murdoch’s energies are now focussed on two companies he has identified as entrenched monopolies of the kind he loves to duel against. One is Google and the other is The New York Times, against which he is launching a New York City edition of the Journal.
Both of them fit the bill of the usual Murdoch enemy – they are large, liberal, entrenched and pleased with themselves. Google’s equation of its own interests with the public good is guaranteed to make his hackles rise.
Of course, the Murdoch who has reappeared with a vengeance is not always pleasant. One of his editors told me once that “he bowls off a long run-up”, meaning (for non-cricketers) that he would not hold back his temper if he felt they had let him down.
Update: However, it seems to be having some effect. Google has promptly announced changes to its First Click Free programme under which people can access a single story on a news site free through Google. That caused problems for the Journal because people could evade its paywall for subscription stories.
Now Google is placing a five click per day limit on people coming through to a single site, which prevents wholesale evasion of the subscription limits. Writing in the Journal today, Eric Schmidt, chief executive of Google, defends his service as “a great source of promotion” for newspapers.
Nasty Rupert gets results.
