He has far more control of the media than any single company could hope to buy indirectly (and it'd be cheaper to just buy it directly at that point I think).
Google should have brought the independent when it was up for sale cheap
Shrug. It's got to be owned by someone.
Somebody is going to own the media. It just so happens that Murdoch started some media outlets.
It's much better than the media being state-run.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_conglomerate
If you go to the local level, John Oliver did a segment on Sinclair Broadcast Group that owns a bunch of local news stations and pushes political propaganda to them.
http://www.indiewire.com/2017/07/john-oliver-local-news-cons...
The point being is you have all our media digestible content, particularly news, controlled by a handful of corporations.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nexstar_Media_Group
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinclair_Broadcast_Group
Sinclair, the one Oliver mentions, covers 40% of US households and is only the second largest next to Nexstar.
You don't think Oliver is above propaganda do you?
Disagree. Why do you think anyone "owning the media" would be a giood idea, let alone an acceptable one.
I definitely think it's better for individuals and regulated corporations to own it than for the media to be state-run.
But neither argument is very convincing. There's a lot of cheap land, and there are a lot of cheap ways to publish your opinions widely.
On YouTube, if your account is suspended, you are severed from your audience that you worked hard to build.
Sure, you can find cheap/free land, but don't you think you would feel that someone stole your work, robbed you of the fruits of your labor, if the land you toiled for years to make fertile is taken away from you?
This think tank situation is tip of the iceberg of what Google is doing in terms of censorship (suspensions/terminations/demonetization) on their platforms.
If I voluntarily chose to took away on land owned by someone else under express terms that allowed it to be taken away arbitrarily, I’d kind of expect that risk, and wouldn't view it as theft.
There's a reason plenty of people making a living selling video content use YouTube to distribute promotional material but some other mechanism to monetize the content.
You may be willing to toil the earth at new location, but not having those same customers who want to buy from you at new location, is the biggest loss, more so than the land.
The land owner, didn't mind what you were doing, it's even legal what you were doing, but then one fine day the landowner dated a girl who didn't like that you cultivated onions, she hates onions, she convinced the landowner to get rid of you. And the landowner owns 70% of the land in your country and 90% of the produce buyers are also residing on the same lands. Going to new land is much much unfair proposition. At these scales the legal system, which still exists and has power, should step in an break apart the land owner or impose rules which forces him to play fair.
Anti-trust laws exist for this very reason. Break up Google.
Fox criticized Trump
Trump said Fox sucks
Viewership went down
"Oops, Trump is great"
Money are back in.
Which is exactly why the principle of free speech (as opposed to "the first amendment to the US Constitution") doesn't just apply to legal consequences, and free speech absolutely does require freedom from some consequences.