Non-censorship shocker – The Punch allows anti-Murdoch comments
I think I’ve spotted a healthy sign that The Punch is starting to find its way.
Earlier this week, editor David Penberthy posted a piece on the potential for charging readers for online content. He set out his ideal online paper, and asked readers whether they’d be willing to pay.
But the impressive thing is that, despite the comment thread turning into something of a cavalcade of hate against News Ltd, the comments have been left up there.
And they are pretty harsh:
“I would rather dig my own eyes out with a spoon than pay Rupert Murdoch one cent of my hard earned for his biased, propaganderous dribble!”
“I will never pay for content… particularly the garbage, sensationalistic tripe that oozes from News Ltd sites.”
“Am guessing this is the reason that little Murdoch has been at the throat of the BBC in the UK. It is hard to charge for something when the BBC is giving it away for free. The same goes for Australia too. Farewell news limited.”
“Half of the news (probably more) on news.com is sourced from overseas anyway. And many of the Australian articles seen in the news these days seems to be full of spelling mistakes, grammatical errors as well as factual errors. Pay for this?? Err I don’t think so..I’ll get it from the BBC or the ABC thanks.”
“Not to mention the myriad of blogs out there that generally perform a hell of a lot better than NewsLimited. So yeah, good luck with your pay model. Won’t work, but it will be fun to watch Ruperts media empire slowly collapse.”
“I can get more unbiased news elsewhere, and I do, to balance what I read on News Ltd. Just like I also read international news, but not from Fox in the US, which is also owned by News of course.”
“News.com will need to lift its game if it wants to attract paying customers. The articles (and headlines!) regularly have spelling mistakes and typos and the articles frequently contain false information”
“News Ltd would have to dramatically improve the quality of its journalism, and employ a decent sub-editor or two to clean up the copy (when fee-payment comes in, I’ll be buying from Fairfax for these two reasons I’m afraid).”
“Online “news” becoming another Murdoch snow-job. Half baked ill-informed opinion passing itself off as news, while we pay for the privilege through subscription.”
I don’t think I’ve ever read this amount of anti-Murdoch content on a News Corp media property before, here or anywhere else in the world.
And that’s why I think that’s such a positive sign for The Punch. If they’d moderated away those sort of comments, then the punters would have soon gone elsewhere to have an uncensored conversation. But this will have built a little trust.
And the chances are that next time the topic comes up, at least some of those critics will have already had their say, and the debate will move on.
of course, that’s how media should be – allowing unbiased debate. But the reality has never been that way. Murdoch editors often happen to spontaneously toe the News Corp line. That’s why this is such a change.
It must have been fairly uncomfortable for The Punch team seeing those comments stream in, but they deserve a lot of credit for leaving them up.
Tim Burrowes
Tim Burrowes founded Mumbrella in 2008. He worked on Mumbrella until 2021. At various points he was editor, content director and editor-at-large.
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Sure its great, but the problem of internet comments remains. People aren’t really discussing, they are ranting, never to return to the page.
Just like I’m leaving this comment never to see the “discussion” I’ve started…
I’ll see you tomorrow, not here though, on the next post.
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Tim, you haven’t been reading the responses I’ve been getting to my column in The Australian’s Media section. I am regularly confronted by the strength of anti-Murdoch feeling expressed by my bloggers. I don’t edit out people’s opinions, so it all gets a run on Murdoch’s own site. It’s not only the number of people willing to condemn; it’s the torrid, vicious nature of the condemnation, coupled with a dancing-on-the-grave delight at the perceived impending demise of a global mogul that I find both puzzling and regrettably uncivil. As Murdoch once said of himself – you’d think he was a genocidal tyrant.
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I agree and have noted that Mark Day’s blog indeed does publish a good deal of User generated anti Murdoch sentiment. The Australian have been particularly transparent about the response to a User pays approach to News Limited content.
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Wouldn’t let me keep a gag about John Hartigan in one of my articles though. Hehe.
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Thanks for flagging that up, Mark.
Because I usually see your column in print, I’ve been failing to check out your comment stream online, and I’ll make more effort to do so.
Maybe I’m being naive, but my feeling is that having given vent to some of these issues, people will move on, and the conversation will become more constructive. Here’s hoping, anyway…
Cheers,
Tim – Mumbrella
Tim – I dearly hope people CAN move on past the ranting that’s being passed off as intelligent comment. I’ve seen vast streams of bile poured out without a real point or argument to be found… it has been going on a long time though, I hope your optimism proves to be well placed.
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Oh, thank you Mr Day. Thank you so much!
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