News Corp, the multi-national mass media company owned by Rupert Murdoch, has reported a loss of $817 million for the 2017 financial year due to the value of its newspapers in Australia and the UK falling.
The loss equates to roughly a 2 per cent drop in their total revenue and is the result of lower print advertising revenues and foreign currency fluctuations during that period.
This disappointing news comes fresh off the back of ongoing cuts to the Australian arm of Murdoch’s media empire that has seen the majority of production and sub-editing staff being made redundant, including up to 70 staff photographers.
Despite this, News Corp’s digital advertising revenue now accounts for 25% of all revenue from their news and information division, up from 22% last year.
One of its major holdings is News International, a publisher in the UK whose properties include The Times and The Sun, not to mention the disgraced and now-defunct paper News of the World.
Whilst speaking about so-called fake news, chief executive Robert Thomson claimed that News Corp challenges what he named as a:
dysfunctional content eco-system, in which the fake and the fraudulent have flourished.
He added that News Corp were in advanced discussions with digital platforms:
over the creation of payment mechanisms for news of verified veracity.
It seems that News Corp pride themselves in honest and straight-forward reporting. It’s a shame they have such short memories.
From headlines claiming football shirts banned in the name of political correctness to the classic rumour that straight sex cannot give you AIDS, The Sun obviously cares about its facts.
But there’s also more sinister and worrying reportage.
Do they remember for instance, that in 2015 The Sun was accused of producing hate speech by the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein? This was in response to an article in The Sun that called migrants “cockroaches”, with the author of the article, a certain Katie Hopkins, going on to claim that:
NO, I don’t care. Show me pictures of coffins, show me bodies floating in water, play violins and show me skinny people looking sad.
I still don’t care.
In this case at least, the veracity of the article was easily verifiable.
Let’s not also forget the tragedy at Hillsborough and how the victims were painted by the then-editor, Kelvin MacKenzie. Underneath a headline “The Truth” were claims that Liverpool fans pick-pocketed and verbally abused the dead, also savagely attacking and even urinating on the police whilst the disaster was ongoing.
They later confessed that they had believed the smears of the South Yorkshire Police, what they referred to as a “pack of lies”. At the time of publishing, MacKenzie originally planned to run with the headline “You Scum” but had decided against it.
Later, The Guardian wrote that:
The claim that supporters higher up the Leppings Lane terrace had urinated on police pulling bodies out of the crush appeared to have roots in the fact that those who were dying or sustaining serious injuries suffered compression asphyxia and many involuntarily urinated, vomited and emptied their bowels as they were crushed.
If you wanted to check the veracity levels this time around, look no further than Anfield football club, who have now banned all journalists working for The Sun from attending football matches held there.
But perhaps now that we live in the digital age, all of that can be consigned to the history books. Maybe now, The Sun and its sister papers will become a lone bastion of cutting-edge internet journalism that informs its vast readership. What do you think?
Are we at Evolve Politics part of that ecosystem of misinformation they vowed to take on for themselves? After all, if the The Sun says it’s committed to “verified veracity”, who are we to be so disbelieving…
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