Green agenda to defang the News

And more broadly the regulation and certification mania makes little sense when anyone can set themselves up as an online news outlet, and anyone can be a citizen journalist. What next? A licence to blog?

There used to be huge barriers to entry for new media organisations - audiences took time to accumulate and production and distribution capacity was expensive to build. Now the Internet lowers production and distribution costs almost to nothing, and databases coupled to viral marketing give diverse organisations from Microsoft to Telstra access to huge potential audiences.

Given developments in media it would be easier to make a case that Newscorp ought to be able to expand its footprint, than that it should contract.

Certainly it is one of the only media organisations prepared to do proper investigative journalism with the newsrooms of its print rivals being down-sized, and the ABC spreading its resources over too many programs and too many platforms.

Which is undoubtedly why it is being targetted.

Increasingly most of the Fourth Estate recycles media releases and retails gossip masquerading as news and analysis. That's bad for democracy, but good for politicians who happen to be in power.

At the moment the Greens are in power and will do anything to keep it that way, the facts be damned.