Washington, DC — Escalating the battle between traditional newspapers and online news providers, Google Inc. and a list of other Web news aggregate companies Tuesday, publicly accused Rupert Murdoch and his Newscorp chain of “solely and irresponsibly looting news articles of their unbiased truth. Thereby creating, out of whole cloth, the paper news industry’s decline.”
Speaking together at a Washington forum on the future of newspapers, Larry Page-Brin and Sergey Brin-Page, the openly gay, newlywed co-founders of Google said, “His continuous, highly detailed and wholesale misappropriation of truth in reporting stories is legend in the news world.
“Murdoch has been lying to our faces about journalism all these years,” the pair continued. “The French-International term “faux journeaux” was conceived and created by the esteemed French Language Institute to describe him and only him.” They said together.
“faux journeaux” is an official entry in the Dictionnaire Français Nationaux. Not just any street term gets into that dictionary. You can believe us, we know from dictionaries. We own all the dictionaries in the world.” said Larry Page-Brin.
“Except that French DFN one,” said Sergey Brin-Page. “They wouldn’t sell it to us because we aren’t French-speaking.”
“Murdoch, Newscorp and Fox think they have the right to take true news content and remake it for their own purposes without any consideration of the impact on others in the story.” said Larry Page-Brin, speaking soto voce, or without help from his spouse, Sergey.
“Their almost wholesale misappropriation of the truth in their stories is not fair use. To be impolite, it’s outright lying.” said Sergey Brin-Page, also speaking singly, showing his own independent style.
These remarks about Murdoch, who is chairman of Newscorp, and publishes the Wall Street Journal, the New York Post and Britain’s The Times, were the latest retort in a verbal war begun by Google and other news web sites like Huffington Post that comb the Web for headlines and gather them all in one spot so people on the web can find them.
Previous to this presentation, only Murdoch has been twisting in the wind with his media grumping about all the wealth he has lost to these “thieves”. A term he has publicly, yet confusedly called either Brin-Page or Page-Brin, mixing up the two men’s identities whenever he refers to them, then in despair calling them “those Googley-Googley Boys”.
He has vehemently condemned their aggregation practice, which he has to pay for on his GoogleAdSense account, click by click for each of his papers. There are hundreds of thousands of clicks at his list of papers daily. A tidy sum that he wishes to stop paying out. He feels this is adding an irretrievable cash injury to his already declining loss of profit, due to his not being able to sell ad space for his hemorrhaging cashflow balance sheet.
Mr. Murdoch said, “Producing great journalism is expensive. I know this because I tried producing high-quality content once. I couldn’t afford it. I found that what people seemed to really want was blood and gore. Gun fights, dog fights, cock fights. Lots of seedy stuff about abortions gone wrong, That kind of thing. And I became famous and just a little bit rich for giving it to them.”
Murdoch said of today’s online readers of his newspapers, “most of these [bleeping] people are not worth anything. The [bleepers] only read the one page or look at the one photo that they [bleeping] googled and then they [bleeping] leave. Where’s the ad revenue in that [bleeping] model?”
It has recently been revealed that a highly profitable Google/MySpace combo ad deal reputed to be worth a cool billion cash to Murdoch is in the crapper too. It seems Murdoch was unable to increase the face-counts on MySpace, as he promised. Google required minimum numbers to market their advertising. Rupert couldn’t deliver so Google didn’t send him the billion. Already a billionaire, he was denied being called a multi-billionaire by the 2010 Forbes Billionaire List. A real downgrade.
Asked about this little hitch in their business dealings, Mr. Murdoch said “I can’t comment on that as I don’t have final numbers yet from the MySpace people. My son James, the president of MySpace is busy buying his new yacht in Brisbane and can’t be reached on his cell. Sadly for Brin-Page and Page-Brin,” clearly mixing them up yet again, “is that I sent a whopper of an antique silver tea service to their wedding, even though I wasn’t invited. I know I saw a bill somewhere for the thing, like $50 grand or so – and in USD, too. Hope they like their tea.”
Arianna Huffington of “HuffPo” fame waltzed into the room, bussed Rupert on both cheeks while Rupert bussed her right ear with his left hand. Quickly, Arianna then stepped up to the microphone and addressed the media tycoon personally, “Rupert, darling, you are confusing my patented style of news aggregation, my successful Huffington Post, with what I have always called your ‘yesterday’s bird cage liner’.”
“Talk about having your aggregation cake and bitching about others having a piece too,” Huffington said. “This guy calls me a “tattered veil” in the news and then steals my patented aggregation software and puts it on his FoxNews.com so those ‘news people’ can find a story to report about; his RottenTomatoes.com where he takes other writer’s movie reviews and pastes them into his site; and in his WSJ.com’s tech section where he ‘reports’ on tech tips that he pastes in from other web tech sites. Good ol’ Rupert is the ‘Copy/Paste Queen of the Internet’. That’s theft of the fraudulent style by me.”
Arianna continued “It’s only about helping people find the information they are looking for,” she said. She stressed that “it’s very, very simple darling, dozens of newspapers have closed and thousands of jobs have been lost in the last several years. Rupert is shirking his responsibility to the labor workforce he dumped out in the streets. We can’t be blamed for causing his problems. He’s crying like a stuck pig here while his son is off buying another yacht.”
Arianna invited Brin-Page and Page-Brin (addressing each one correctly) up to the dais with her and posed for photos with a background poster that touted the new Google “Rupert–Free Web Search”.
No, Bobz, I believe you mean Se La Vue.
Maybe I am too subtle. I was trying to fling a frizbee over their heads to distract from the “under table” issues of adult immaturity, schmoozing with your enemies, misinforming the public by mispronouncing names and air-kissing the asses of whoever is in office/power. Say la vie.
I’m confused. I thought it was our duty as Glossy News writers to search any media outlet at our disposal and then regurgitate the news as best we can by putting a whole new spin on it to make it more palatable for the masses. In other words, the bigger the lie the better. Does this mean that we are never going to be recognized as real journalists? Bobz? Do you think Brian will be accused of faux journeauxlism as well?