Sunday Times: Pay Up To Have Us Tell You How We Were Totally Wrong In Our Climate Change Story

Rupert Murdoch's News Corp is rumored to want to make Fox News a pay site. After reading this article where the original article which was erroneous due to a Times error stays in the archives of the Net while their retraction is back behind their pay wall, makes us question the reasoning behind Murdoch wanting to take Fox News to a pay site. If Murdoch does that, it will be the last we will use Fox News as a source for anything.

We remember what Murdoch did to the two San Antonio papers when he owned one and bought the other. We went from having a military friendly San Antonio Light which was conservative to a more liberal San Antonio Express News. He owned the Light first but after buying the Express News, most Light employees were laid off.

We very seldom use the Wall Street Journal for a source and rely on IBD after Murdoch's News Corp won the battle for the Wall Street Journal and took the Journal to a pay site. We understand that sites like The Journal need to make money but sell ads like they do for newspapers. I needed an article for a source and to get the article, I would have had to pay over $100 so I looked until I finally found it on-line.

Old media needs to find new ways to earn money -- charging to view their website articles is not the way. We already pay an access fee to get on line and now they want us to pay to read the news? If this happens, CNN, if they handle it right, could go back on top of the cable news.

Sunday Times: Pay Up To Have Us Tell You How We Were Totally Wrong In Our Climate Change Story

from the that's-worth-paying-for? dept

Now that Rupert Murdoch has put up his paywalls around The Times of London and the Sunday Times, it's creating some interesting moral and journalistic dilemmas. Earlier this year, apparently the Sunday Times ran a highly publicized report claiming that climate change scientists had made predictions about rainforest threats from climate change that were based on bogus information. Unfortunately, it turns out that that the bogus part was actually in the coverage by The Times, and not the researchers. Months later, The Times has issued a massive retraction. While the Sunday Times has simply disappeared the original article from the web (article? what article?), the retraction is behind the paywall. This is leading some to question the journalistic ethics here. If you put out a huge, publicly-accessible, fear-mongering report that accuses researchers of relying on junk science... and it turns out to be totally wrong, doesn't there seem to be something wrong about then putting the retraction behind a paywall? I recognize that the Sunday Times' strategy is for all of its content to be paywalled, but there are times when you make an exception. This seems like an important one.

Source: Tech Dirt