Work Different

Now Murdoch’s News Corp. is using Fox News (Glenn Beck) and the Wall Street Journal to say *Google* was at the heart of the Egyptian uprising because one of their executives used Facebook to participate in the evolution.

This is actually a kind of fortunate turn of events if you think about it.  It’s interesting to consider that the fact that lightening speed communal linking and information sharing is not at the heart of the unrest, but rather that Google somehow was an instigator.  A treasure trove for conspiracy theories.  In any case, to stoke that fire a little, from a New York Magazine article in 2010:

Murdoch has a particular animus against Google. He believes the search giant is stealing his content while wrapping itself in that familiar cloak, albeit one with New Age–y Silicon Valley stylings: “Don’t be evil.” Much as he has done in the newspaper wars he’s fought over the last 60 years, he wants to turn the tables, call Google’s moral authority into question. At its core, Murdoch’s fight is about getting Google to pay to put his content into the search index. Publicly, Google treats this as a nonstarter. “We’re not going to pay for indexing,” says Josh Cohen, the head of Google News. “It’s something we just don’t do.”

Before Murdoch realized that Google posed a mortal threat to his empire, he used to praise it, recalls one former News Corp. employee. “We would be sitting in meetings, and he’d go on and on about the Google guys, and how they had dry cleaning and massages, and what a great company and culture it was,” the staffer recalls. When he bought the Journal, Murdoch thought about making online content free, even though the Journal was one of the few successes in fee-based news sites. And Murdoch and Wendi are friends with Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, though they are not as close lately, given the heated nature of their conflict.

Last year, Murdoch and his senior executives decided they needed an organized counteroffensive. As a code name, they chose Project Alesia, named after Julius Caesar’s victorious siege of the Gallic forces in 52 B.C. Murdoch conceived the fight against Google as a political campaign. He mapped out distinct phases. First, Murdoch and Thomson would make a series of provocative speeches to drum up press, using News Corp.’s media outlets and other interview opportunities to shape the debate. In February 2009, during an appearance on Charlie Rose, Thomson said, “Google devalues everything it touches.” In April, Thomson said in an interview, “Certain websites are best described as parasites or tech tapeworms in the intestines of the Internet.” And in December, Murdoch published an op-ed in the Journal declaring that “there are those who think they have a right to take our news content and use it for their own purposes without contributing a penny to its production … To be impolite, it’s theft.”

Read the full article here.

Tags: conspiracies, Egypt

This entry was posted on February 24, 2011 at 7:53 am and is filed under Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.