Snap, gulp
Bad news – National Geographic is being devoured by Fox.
The 127-year-old nonprofit National Geographic Society has struck a $725 million deal that gives 21st Century Fox a majority stake in National Geographic magazine and other media properties, expanding an existing TV partnership.
The agreement announced Wednesday will give the company controlled by Rupert Murdoch’s family a 73 percent stake in the new National Geographic Partners venture. The society retains 27 percent ownership. The move shifts the longtime nonprofit flagship magazine into a for-profit venture.
What could possibly go wrong?
Besides everything?
However, some observers are worried about the future of National Geographic’s educational mission in media if control is turned over to commercial interests.
Christopher Palmer, an environmental filmmaker and professor at American University, said Fox and National Geographic would seem to be incompatible to most people.
“Many people feel the National Geographic Channel has become more sensational and think that it’s due to the Foxification of the channel, and now Fox is taking over all these other media properties including the iconic National Geographic magazine,” he said. “So the question is: will National Geographic maintain its very high standards in the future under this new arrangement?”
It seems vanishingly unlikely that they will.
Certain Scienceblogs should feel right at home.
I am concerned. I’ve been maintaining my scienceblogs site as an escape hatch in case the mob at FtB decides to axe me…and now it’s owned by Rupert Murdoch? Jesus. Ed & I left Sb because NatGeo was going to impose new requirements on us, and I can’t imagine what Murdoch would do. I’m not exactly politically sympatico with him.
It may be moot. Scienceblogs has been neglected for a long, long time — last time I heard from the ‘community manager’ was back in May, and that was just to tell us all that his email address was changing. There has been no comment by NatGeo to any of us so far.
Hmmm, and I’d wondered in recent times why the National Geo documentaries weren’t as good as they were in decades gone by. Nothing good shall come of this.
PZ, it’s not the axe you have to worry about. It’s the pitchfork and the torches. :-)
Well, if people start entertaining the idea of going after PZ with pitchforks and torches, hopefully that will be the point at which many of them will stop for a moment and think “Wait, what? Really, seriously, it’s come to this? Perhaps I could re-examine some of my assumptions and behaviours on this one.”
Maybe.
(Of course, I would hope that would be the response whenever the pitchfork stage was reached, no matter the identity of the intended target.)
I pity the mob that enrages the Kraken. Back on topic though. There has been a trend for media to become much more swallowed up by conglomerates over the last couple of decades. Lots of mastheads, but a very narrow editorial philosophy. many cries of left wing bias every time an individual journalist says something even modestly progressive or liberal, but silence over the fact that vast swathes of print, TV, radio and even internet media are openly conservative or right-leaning.
What a very bad idea.
It does seem an unnverving thing, to put it gently. NatGeo always did strike me as a bit fluffy/pop–archaeology with a side of adventure tourism–but at least they did expeditions, got out of the office, paid for people to dig up bones. Far cry from a lot of modern ‘newsrooms’ which do little more than reprint press releases.
Part also of the ongoing meltdown of the media that was, I think. I can’t say I’m at all confident what’s replacing it is going to be especially healthy for our civilization. What worries me is the so-called ‘citizen journalism’ that’s sometimes held up as the next hope looks a bit outmatched against the scale and power of modern government and business institutions. It was a fashionable thing to worry about concentration in the media even twenty years ago. I’m not sure it’s any less worrisome now.
I attended a talk at a conference which was about the style and substance of NatGeo articles, illustrated to better demonstrate how they were heavily slanted toward presenting most everything as decorative objects rather than things that record data to better understand the world. It was pretty clearly so.
That was 1981.
Oh, crikey, I completely forgot that Science blogs is part of National Geographic. Crap.
The mob at FTB is going to keep right on waving torches and pitchforks at PZ unless he does a formal denunciation of me. Until this moment I was thinking he had a refuge at Science blogs.
A candle of hope, Sky TV (BSkyB) is the Murdoch owned TV network in the UK, and is producing some good stuff. Much of this is to compete with the BBC. The 2 Sky Arts channels are as highbrow and unsullied by commercial pressures as one would hope for. New Attenborough docs are now regular fixtures on Sky, and so on.
Let’s recall that many people were gravely concerned at the prospect of Fox getting its grubby hands on the new Cosmos series, and other than some grumblings about the presence of commercial breaks, I think those fears proved to be unwarranted.