By Raimundo Ortiz
Following up on the first post about Rupert Murdoch’s musings on jouralism’s future, it’s time to tackle the topic of cross-ownership. Murdoch, shockingly enough, has a problem with the restrictions of cross-ownership.
His point is that television and news are no longer main competitors to one another, and that as times have changed it’s now ridiculous to disallow someone from owning a newspaper and TV station in the same place. He likened it to banning a newspaper from having a website.
To this I say…eh. I still don’t think cross-ownership is a great idea. While online news and cable news provide more competition cross-ownership still would allow for someone to dominate a market.
As far as government aid to newspapers, a la auto industry, Murdoch posits that this would be devastating to the industry as a whole. ”The Founding Fathers knew that the key to independence was to allow enterprises to prosper and serve as a counterweight to government power. It is precisely because newspapers make profits and do not depend on the government for their livelihood that they have the resources and wherewithal to hold the government accountable.”
I couldn’t have said it better myself. If the newspapers can’t hold the government accountable then they’re not worth having.
I find Murdoch’s take here interesting…he’s worried about journalists and their ability to check the government at the same time as spouting about “give consumers what they want” which is code for print tabloid-esque stories. This is clearly because the government inhibits his grand designs on domination. Nonetheless, his point about government bailouts of newspapers is spot-on. I must give him credit for that.
