Rupert Murdoch's Internet Check-Out Line.

Because I'm a news junkie, I'll read just about anything on the Internet, always mindful to consider the source. That simple pearl of wisdom acts as a wonderful chaperone when I click on any of Rupert Murdoch's slanted and trashy News Corp. properties. Visiting the websites of the New York Post or FOX News is the cyber-equivalent of reading the tabloids in a grocery store check-out line; you know it's bullshit, but it passes the time and it's free.

With newspaper advertising revenues at an all-time low, and with Rupert being Rupert, the Aussie a-hole plans to soon begin charging to read his newspapers online. That's like ponying up for Weekly World News down at the market instead of sneaking a quick peek for nothing.

From Michael Wolff on Newser.com:

Is Rupert Murdoch too old to matter? In the face of the worst downturn in the history of the newspaper business—what everybody except Rupert believes is a structural rather than cyclical decline—he bought the Wall Street Journal, built the world’s largest newspaper printing plant just outside of London, and is still talking about buying the New York Times. Yesterday, his company, News Corp., posted the biggest losses in its history. In response, my Uncle Rupert—who as recently as a year ago, when we last spoke, had yet to go, unassisted, onto the Internet—announced that he would shortly make his newspapers available online only if you paid for them.

Well, I'll say this, he’s swimming against the tide.

His uphill fight is probably even greater than it might appear. Not only is he, among all media executives, the most technically disinclined (actually, totally illiterate), but his company, of all the big media enterprise, is the most technically backward and maladroit. He may now employ more reporters than anyone else in the world, but they use the oldest computers. He may have some of the world’s most trafficked news sites, but they are also the slowest and most inept. Technology, at News Corp., has always been regarded as one of those things, like fancy hotels, or long-form writing, that are not part of the company culture...

What’s more, he believes this new world, like the older one in which he succeeded, is a tabloid world: “When we have a celebrity scoop, the number of hits we get now are astronomical,” he said, unmindful that his scoop, on the Internet, is a second away from being everybody else’s scoop. “We'll be asserting our copyright at every point,” he added, like a man getting ready to go to war (say in Iraq or Vietnam)...

At this point, however, for him to continue to own the news, for the world to go on existing in large measure in Rupert Murdoch’s version of the news, you are going to have to pay him per click.

You might. I won't.