News Corp chief executive Robert Thomson. ‘The words “intellectual property” don’t appear in the Google alphabet.’ Picture: Richard Dobson Source: News Corp Australia
News Corp chief executive Robert Thomson has attacked Google for piracy, zealotry and kleptocracy for its disregard of copyright and distribution of journalism created by others.
In a speech at the Lowy Institute Media Awards last night, Mr Thomson warned that, without proper remuneration, well-resourced reporting would be further challenged in the future, with the digital age hostile to investment in journalism.
Mr Thomson, in Australia for News Corp’s board meeting, said aggregators and distributors such as Google, Facebook and LinkedIn had a “new-found fondness for premium content” created by others, but had an aversion to paying for it.
Provocatively, he also called LinkedIn “pretenders” and “spammers”.
“The supposed idealism of these companies is in stark contrast to their actual behaviour,” Mr Thomson said. “That Google’s newly conceived parent company is to be called Alphabet has itself created a range of delicious permutations: A is for avarice, B is for bowdlerise, through to K for kleptocracy, P for piracy and Z for zealotry.”
Mr Thomson said he was fortunate to be a custodian in a company that invested in thousands of creative acts around the world each day, from great journalism and compelling analysis to feisty blogs, captivating videos and brilliant books.
But, he said, Google and other aggregators had little respect for original content or copyright created by media companies struggling to profit from news.
“The words ‘intellectual property’ don’t appear in the Google alphabet,” he said.
Mr Thomson said there was a “deficit in reporting resources created by the egregious aggregation of news by distributors for whom provenance is an inconvenience and who are contemptuous of copyright”.
While media companies such as News Corp created important content, he said, the distributors were 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. 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.”
Mr Thomson contrasted this with the nature of newspapers, which were characterised by public debate and carried passionate arguments about issues.
Moving to a greater distribution of politically correct content by the “e-elites”, Mr Thomson said, was taking place without any serious discussion of the social consequences.
He paid tribute to News Corp’s executive chairman Rupert Murdoch and said that, without him, instead of being at a fine award ceremony that celebrated the continued importance of journalism, the group would be in the backroom at a dingy pub lamenting its passing.
August 14, 2015