Globe and Mail : will the Commercial paywall become merely a Conservative echo chamber ?

Hoisted on his own Petard !

Ironic, ain't it ? Most of the world's loudest & most bombastic right wing newspapers have totally disappeared from public view --- behind a commercially-oriented paywall --- reducing their public influence to zero. This certainly wasn't their original intention (money,money,money was their intent) - but this situation is the totally unexpected results.


The right wingers who own and run Canada's leading newspaper, the GLOBE and MAIL and who are about to leap in the fire and erect a paywall should pay heed to the sad story of Rupert Murdoch's earlier experiments in this area.

Whatever inane right wing notions Rupert Murdoch's LONDON TIMES is touting this week, you and I (because we are not living in the UK) won't even hear of it, unless we pay to get behind its digital "all or nothing" total  paywall.

The TIMES, as you have probably noticed, as been marked "absent" from the worldwide digital news conversation the last few years - even search engines like Goggle carries nothing from them - because Rupert-Murdoch-the-Genius planned it that way.

As a result, even the influence of the once all-powerful print version of the paper has also been reduced to nearly zero.

Sure its subscribers read it faithfully - but they are die-hard right-wingers so there is no influencing the undecided at play here : you can't preach to the already-converted, you can merely confirm their faith.

The result is a tiny closed community of true believers, echoing each other in the echo chamber that is the LONDON TIMES : a mere 400,000 readers in a world of more seven billion citizens.

Murdoch bought the TIMES to serve as his bully-pulpit, to expand the influence of his inane right wing notions --- and to make him more money.

Paywalls around right wing newspapers reduces their influence to zero : become echo chamber for right wing subscribers only

The paywall didn't make him money, merely reduced his huge losses ---- but it also reduced the political-public impact of this once world opinion leader to echoing the certitudes of a few hundred thousand die-hard far righters.

So news that Murdoch has totally thrown in the towel and admitted this total paywall was an abject failure editorially, comes as no real surprise.

He will now admit defeat and allow Google and other search engines to index the headlines and opening paragraph "lede" of the TIMES' articles : hoping that if the unconverted will not buy a subscription , they will at least absorb some of his bile from the misleading headline and dishonest opening lede.

Public Influence or Profitable Paywall : pick one.

Lots of money and lots of influence, the age-old dream of lots of newspaper barons, is dead : you can have one but not the other.....

Sharp Elbows plentiful in Penicillin Fame Saga

Imagine our surprise when we consulted The Times over the
(in) famous exchange in the Times' Letters section over who
deserved the credit for penicillin, to discover that the whole
affair had actually been started by a letter from TRC (probably
Glaxo ) seeking to grab more than its fair share of the growing acclaim !

And while Fleming, finally, got to work doing something useful
with penicillin in the latter part of the war, Florey devoted
much energy in that same period to giving a similar-sounding
historically oriented lecture, over and over, to various professional meetings.

Its sole intent seemed to have been to undercut Fleming's claim
to be the first to discover and use penicillin, but to do so by
means of an oblique attack so Florey couldn't be publicly seen as 'reaching' for fame - something too undignified for a FRS...

That whole period from August '42 till the naming of the Nobel
winners turned out to have witnessed quite an organized effort
by the Oxford group to grab the bulk of the credit - albeit doing so by avoiding public and the general media.

Its almost worth a book on its own - a prime example of how scientific and public acclaim is organized and manipulated.