My Thoughts On... News Ownership!

Who owns the news?

That is a good question. Even though I would like to believe that the mass consumer audience has a say in what is and what is not news, I tend to think that money-heavy corporations, including the likes of CNN and Fox News control the news (who am I kidding, who actually watches Fox News?!) They have a choke-hold on news distribution and present the news with a certain bias, according to their views and beliefs. Their news consists of what they deem appropriate for the mass consumer audience. Since these corporations are mainstream and recognizable, they tend to garner a large amount of viewership and traffic to their websites. It is a shame that the “big suits” control our news because they have more money and power than the rest of society. News should not be biased; not be controlled. It should be a democracy, not a dictatorship.

The case with the New York Times removing their RSS feed from an iPad application called ‘Pulse’ just shows how corporate conglomerates think they control the news, even when ironically they are actually getting free promotion and traffic to their website. The ‘Pulse’ application on the iPad was actually doing a good thing, combining news from different sources to give the user a more complete range of dynamic news. In a way, the NY Times can be perceived to be preventing readers from actually reading their news, which is an aspect of control. They believe you should actually purchase their newspaper or visit their website to get their news, instead of it being available on a 3rd party application. The NY Times main argument was that ‘Pulse’ infringed on the NY Times copyright terms of using the company’s news in a product that charges a fee for download. This is reasonable, but when you take into account that they were actually gaining more viewership and attention, they decided to pull their news from the app.

Just the fact that news costs money (i.e. paying for newspapers, paying for content on news websites, etc.) is the problem alone. News should be free and available to anyone, anywhere, at anytime.