Why Google Needs To Keep Murdoch

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12 points·lmohdlp··5 comments

This article is a classic false dichotomy: Pitting Fox against blogs. In reality, there are literally thousands of news outlets world-wide covering every major story from every angle. If Fox were to disappear from Google, who would even notice?

Checking out Google News right now, there are 9,881 articles on President Obama's recent speech. Fox is just one voice amongst thousands. And ultimately, that's what Murdoch is truly upset about; news is an easy obtained commodity and is therefore rapidly losing its worth.

Yeah, exactly. I wonder if that's why Fox features so much insane commentary? News is fairly easy to get, even primary sources are easy to get, but a community of like-minded people is still worth something.

I bet people watch Fox because they want to hear the commentary of people who share their political beliefs, not because they want to know what's going on in the world.

Kind of like reading Hacker News for the comments.

Absolutely spot on.

This would only make sense if Fox were the only trusted news outlet (to borrow the article's term) that Google indexes. Since it's one of a whole bunch, Fox is really only hurting themselves here.

People will go to Google to search for a story, they'll get a bunch of hits to news sources that are not Fox (and are not blogs, to keep this author's mother happy) and will read those instead.

The choice isn't "Fox or a bunch of blogs", it's "Fox or CNN/BBC/every-other-news-outlet-on-the-planet".

Let Murdoch throw his temper tantrum. Google should black-hole every one of his sites.

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