Rupert Murdoch pushes Facebook to pay news publishers for their work Media Man Int

Rupert Murdoch pushes Facebook to pay news publishers for their work - 23rd January 2018

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'If Facebook wants to recognise 'trusted' publishers then it should pay those publishers a carriage fee similar to the model adopted by cable companies,' says Rupert Murdoch. Bloomberg

by Timothy Moore

Rupert Murdoch wants Facebook to pay for the privilege of distributing stories produced by News Corp and other "professional" news media.

In a statement overnight, the executive chairman of News Corp said both "Facebook and Google have popularised scurrilous news sources through algorithms that are profitable for these platforms but inherently unreliable".

While each company has begun to acknowledge their respective role in the surge of fake news in recent years, Murdoch said far more needs to be done.

"Recognition of a problem is one step on the pathway to cure, but the remedial measures that both companies have so far proposed are inadequate, commercially, socially and journalistically," Murdoch said.

"There has been much discussion about subscription models but I have yet to see a proposal that truly recognises the investment in and the social value of professional journalism," Murdoch said.

In the US, News Corp publishes the Wall Street Journal, the New York Post and operates the Dow Jones news service.

"We will closely follow the latest shift in Facebook's strategy, and I have no doubt that Mark Zuckerberg is a sincere person, but there is still a serious lack of transparency that should concern publishers and those wary of political bias at these powerful platforms," Mr Murdoch said.

Murdoch, who also leads 21st Century Fox, said "the time has come to consider a different route", calling for a system similar to that in cable television, where large distributors like Comcast and AT&T pay fees to the TV network owners that attract their viewers.

TV companies such as Fox, the parent of the namesake broadcast network and Fox News Channel, have avoided the steep subscriber losses that newspapers have experienced as news has moved online. Still, new entertainment services, like Netflix and Google's YouTube, have drawn audiences away from conventional television.

Facebook didn't immediately respond to a request for comment. Alphabet, the parent of Google, also didn't respond.

"If Facebook wants to recognise 'trusted' publishers then it should pay those publishers a carriage fee similar to the model adopted by cable companies," Murdoch said.

"The publishers are obviously enhancing the value and integrity of Facebook through their news and content but are not being adequately rewarded for those services," Murdoch also said.

"Carriage payments would have a minor impact on Facebook's profits but a major impact on the prospects for publishers and journalists."

Excluding conservative sites

Facebook drives about 17 per cent of the visits to the websites of companies participating in Digital Content Next, a group that represents publishers including CNBC, Fox and Al Jazeera, according to Jason Kint, CEO of the organisation.

The social network has had trouble managing its role as one of the world's most powerful news distributors. Ahead of the US presidential election in 2016, Facebook was criticised for bias because its human curators of a "Trending Topics" section were only allowed to pick links from a set of sources Facebook designated as trusted, which excluded some conservative sites.

Murdoch also said earlier this month that News Corp would keep an eye on Facebook's newsfeed changes "for any signs that the weighting of news sites is politically motivated."

Since then, the company has sought to address the spread of fake news while trying to avoid being the arbiter of what is true or false. It works with third-party fact checkers who look at articles flagged by users as potentially false or misleading. Those efforts have had little impact on the overall problem.

Google announced changes to its policy in September. The company revamped its "first click free" program, which lets users read news articles without paying, winning praise from News Corp, one of the technology giant's harshest critics.

The search-engine giant is developing ways to boost subscriptions for news publishers, including a tool for online payments, Bloomberg reported in August. The Wall Street Journal had complained that Google unfairly discriminated against its content after the publisher began blocking the search engine giant's users from reading free articles earlier this year, causing traffic to plummet.

with the Washington Post