Promiscuity, Parasites and Beer

Simply Arianna Huffington has once more shot several vultures with only one shot. Congratulations Arianna! This time she has spelled out the ridiculous arguments from Murdoch News Corp. and some of the NYT arguments as well in a terrific post today in the Huffington Post.

Arianna Huffington

I understand the NYT out of desperation is trying everything, all mad magic potions in order to keep its grandeur of last century. It’s a pool of professionals which deserve all my respects.

But as Arianna has brilliantly exposed in her post today, Murdoch calls everybody “thieves” while he and his companies practice it severely without any shame or apologies: citing the article of Techdirt.com, the post shows that “The Wall Street Journal has a tech section that’s nothing more than a parasite — uh, I mean, aggregator — of outside content. FoxNews.com has a Politics Buzztracker that bloodsucks — uh, I mean aggregates and links to — stories from a variety of different sources, including the NY Times, the Washington Post, MSNBC and others.
AllThingsD has a section called Voices that not only aggregates headlines, but also takes a nice chunk of text — and puts the links out at the bottom of the story.
And Murdoch’s News Corp. also owns IGN, which has a variety of web properties, including the Rotten Tomatoes movie review aggregation site — which is entirely made up of movie reviews pulled together from other places. Did someone say “stealing”?

When “people” of the kind of Murdoch decide to do something against a given situation we can predict all sort of dirty, scummy and filthiness coming along the way. Those kinds of “people” simply don’t know the concept of fairness. The only understand of the world they have is their OWN POWER which, all things considered, will not remain as it is nowadays for much longer.

An old time friend of mine, in Germany, used to say “beer should not be sold but rented; anyway almost always you leave it in the bar you got it from”. And of course I couldn’t stop laughing when I read Arianna relating a discourse she had to hear in Monaco from a German tycoon named Mathias Döpfner, CEO of of the German publisher Axel Springer and creator of the German’s tabloid BILD (controlling 25% of the European Market in 32 countries and more than 150 newspapers and magazines) saying: “If it’s your business decision to offer beer cans for free, fine,” he said. “But don’t take our beer and offer it for free.”

That caused a certain shock to our dear Arianna: “it struck me as a really bizarre metaphor. Information is hardly the same thing as a product that can only be consumed once by a single person. If you consume a news story, you might be one of millions. If you consume a beer, no one else can consume it.”

Well, well, there are “people” with bizarre habits who maybe “recycle” their own beer in order to not share it with the germs of the toilets in the bars. Love for their “products”, maybe.