Posted on 09/10/2015 11:38:18 PM PDT by Cincinatus' Wife
Rupert Murdoch just bought National Geographic. Here’s the problem everybody should be talking about.
The media was up in arms yesterday at news of Murdoch's high-profile acquisition. Here's what you should know.
The news that National Geographic has now been placed in the hands of Rupert Murdoch prompted a predictable outcry, roughly akin to what happens in the movies when the clearly evil tycoon takes the orphans away. A bastion of popular science is now controlled by a very prominent climate change denier who, despite his company’s assurances of editorial integrity, has spent decades interfering with the independence of his properties. A tabloid king could now apply the values of the New York Post to one of the world’s oldest magazines.
I’d be the last to tell anybody not to worry when Murdoch comes to town, but some of the agita missed the fact that National Geographic has had a long partnership with Murdoch’s media empire, most notably through the Nat Geo TV channel. (You didn’t think Nat Geo was airing all of those Bill O’Reilly documentaries because of their educational value, did you?) National Geographic may be sacrificing its non-profit status, but Wednesday’s deal partially cemented what had already been put in place.
Still, that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t take anything away from how unsettling it feels to see a stalwart brand like National Geographic go down such a blatantly commercial path. It has whiffs of the creepiness that surrounded the announcement that HBO will now be the primary home for “Sesame Street.” Both events highlighted the deplorable lack of a non-profit media infrastructure in the United States.
America spends a fraction of the money other industrialized countries do on public media. Networks like the BBC or CBC are far from perfect, but they have a commitment to public service broadcasting that puts American networks to shame. PBS, a mere minnow in this universe, still produces programs on art, science and history that would never make it onto a broadcast network. If you want anything beyond weather reports, top 40 and horrible people discussing sports, public radio is pretty much the only game in town.
Of course, public media in and of itself is not the answer. The news that PBS or NPR produce, for instance, is often as bland and corporate-friendly as the news on any of its rivals, and public broadcasters are often subject to government pressure. But it’s noteworthy that PBS’s biggest troubles have inevitably come from the compromises it has made with business interests in an effort to secure more funding.
There are those who point to cable, with its hundreds of channels, and say it negates the need for more public broadcasting, but that ignores history. Look at the History Channel, or Bravo, or A&E, or TLC. All of them started out doing very worthy things. Then they realized there was more money in moving downmarket. Now, History does lots of reality shows about loggers, and while Andy Cohen is definitely providing a needed public service, it’s pretty clear that his stuff would be out of place on PBS.
I’m not against any of these channels. Who doesn’t love Bravo? But it’s a problem when one beloved public or non-profit institution after another throws up its hands and decides it has to go corporate. More to the point, “Sesame Street” was only able to thrive because it came about during the relatively brief period when the government was actively behind the expansion of public broadcasting. If we don’t figure out how to give more support to public and non-profit media, there’s no guarantee that the next “Sesame Street”—or, for that matter, the next National Geographic—will even get off the ground.
It isn't a science journal anymore, same as Science and other major liberal science propaganda rags.
Seeing that Faux News is increasingly going off the left deep end, Murdoch will likely continue the liberalism of National Geographic. If Faux is any measuring stick, expect its far-left zealotry to go even further in that direction.
He’s definitely a RINO but not a leftist.
Once he buys the farm, son will swing it full tilt left.
Where did “buy the farm” phrase come from anyway :)
Sharecroppers used to say, “I’ll finally buy this farm, but that will be the day I die.”
Actually I made that up.
Public radio -- it's a class thing. All fourteen of their listeners agree.
I personally make no distinction between the two. Similarly I see Nazism and Communism as identical political principles since both are atheistic and totalitarian. As proof, look at the massive genocide committed by both Hitler and Stalin.
As for "bought the farm", here's one source tracing its origin. As for its veracity, I cannot attest.
Thanks. I think the serviceman’s life insurance paying off property makes the most sense.
Wont be using that phrase anymore :(
Nazism was not atheistic. They promoted the 3 Ks, Kirke, Kucke, Kinder (I may not be spelling this right)—Church, Cooking, Children. However, they were definitely totalitarian dictatorships.
The month prior to the 2004 election....came the global warming edition. Every single page...every article...all dedicated to global warming. For roughly ten years I’d been a subscriber to the magazine. I wrote a simple eight line text and noted that I quit. It was a blatant effort to affect the outcome of the election.
Oddly, after that point, I even came to note the same behavior of Readers Digest and quit them.
I agree, if you go back to prior the mid 1990s....it was still a geographical magazine and worth reading. It flipped over and became simple garbage.
The amount paid? 725 million is listed for the Murdoch deal. What they are getting? It’d be curious....if they revert back to the old standard....tens of thousands of people would re-engage with the subscription business.
I'd start subscriptions for my grandkids - just as my grandfather did.
Yes, I was going to say that this Salon author seems to be under the mistaken belief that National Geo was always the globalwarming fruit loop magazine.
I read it for years too until it was taken over by loons
Another shill piece from Salon.
As a kid in the early 1970s....I had an uncle who would come by once a year and dump all his copies of the year at the house. I’d spend an entire month reading carefully through each article and it was probably one of the five big enrichments of my youth.
I should add, among the ‘dump’ would be Argosy Magazine (no longer published but a fine geographical piece), and at least two or three other publications which have also disappeared.
“...They promoted the 3 Ks, Kirke, Kucke, Kinder (I may not be spelling this right)—Church, Cooking, Children...”
The Nazis did not promote any CHRISTIAN Church. The SS developed its own alternative religion. And the regime murdered its best Christians, Scholl, Bonhoeffer, et al.
Without looking at specific editions, I agree pepsionice. National Geographic was being taken over by the left even before 2000, following the destruction by the left of Scientific American, which once published popularized scientific papers by such as Kip Thorne and Alvin Weinberg. Some time in the 70s the antinuclear crowd began to get front page articles. I believe even the fraud so beloved by the Natural Resources Defense Counsel Amory Lovins, now on a retainer by his comrade John Holdren our Presidential Science Advisor, got published. Any scientist who knows of Lovins and Holdren should rue the day their work appears next to such rubbish.
Scientific American’s owner, perhaps a son, was a major supporter of the Institute for Policy Studies, a Marxist hotbed for decades. It took until 2012 for someone to illuminate what had gone on in our government for about 50 years, a remarkable penetration by utopian communists, many working for the KGB, of most all branches of our government. Alger Hiss was one of thousands, Harry Dexter White, Harry Hopkins, were near the top, Hiss having helped create the UN, White defined Chiang Kai-Shek to put Mao in power and Hopkins ran Yalta and much else while FDR was dying, as explained by Diana West in American Betrayal.
Murdoch might return National Geographic to its focus on our remarkable geography and nature. His partner, in this case, is not Obama’s patron, Alwaleed bin Talal, who owned the second largest block of stock in News Corp, Pox News and the WSJ, after Murdoch. The comment about Murdoch’s son also rings true. He is a stalwart defender of Saudi Family issues, and runs a Riyadh-based cable network. These are businesses after all, and Al Jazeera is the largest cable network in the world. The Saudis need to apply petroleum earnings to anything profitable to pay their protectors in the West, who seem for the moment to have abandoned them for the other Islamic Republic still watching wells for the second coming. Perhaps National Geographic can direct is amazing photographers to illuminate humanity instead of acting propagandists for the left.
Anything the left touches, it destroys...
Yeah, me too.
I also deny that left is right, down is up and bad is good.
Just keepin' it real; ya know?
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