By Dan Kennedy • The press, politics, technology, culture and other passions

Huffington-Murdoch hatefest hits D.C.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Dt2-mqgCZ8&hl=en_US&fs=1&]

New Haven Independent editor Paul Bass, on a busman’s holiday in Washington, covers dueling speeches by Huffington Post impresario Arianna Huffington and international media mogul Rupert Murdoch.

Murdoch has been much in the news of late for threatening to make his properties invisible to Google and to cut a deal with Google’s leading competitor, Microsoft’s Bing — the better to stop aggregators like HuffPost from “stealing” his content.

Particularly entertaining is a video (above) Bass posts of Huffington explaining to Murdoch how to insert a line of code that would stop Google from searching his sites.

Huffington and Murdoch spoke at a Federal Trade Commission workshop on the future of journalism.

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3 Comments

  1. Funny how often people who are certain that it’s foolish to try creating news paywalls or to hold back content for subscribers have some income that depends on free access to online news.

    Just a coincidence, I’m sure.

  2. Funny how billionaires rant about people finding their news product by using the search product of another company, have no problem receiving that traffic, then make news by complaining about it, even as they can stop the whole cycle themselves by placing a simple tag on their websites. You have an option “search engine see me” or “search engine dont see me”. Google does NOTHING to prohibit the great one from receiving the direct traffic he can otherwise obtain on his own. Kind of ironic, the media wants to charge advertisers for the exposure they can’t otherwise acquire on their own, yet find it offensive that the sources that send them that very traffic is doing the same thing to them. Perhaps just another coincidence, i’m sure.

  3. You’re quite correct; Murdoch’s a greedy so-and-so who wants to keep his money-making machine running and gets pissed when something interferes. So is Huffington.

    I was reacting to the blogospheric depiction of one point of view as self-serving and the other as far-seeing – when both are equally me-first-ish.

    From media mogul to unpaid blogger, everybody wants to preserve the environment they thrive in.

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