Greg Sandoval at CNET writes about Rupert Murdoch’s latest whining about how “the Google” is stealing from his media empire, and decides, once Google issues a response, to edit the article to add two paragraphs at the end, quoting Google:

Publishers put their content on the Web because they want it to be found. Very few choose not to include their material in Google News and Web search. But if they tell us not to include it, we don’t.

In leaving this a he said/she said argument, Mr. Sandoval is being dishonest.

Unlike Murdoch, whose statements (earlier post) might be an artifact of his being an ignorant old fart who might not understand the following:

All they have to do is go to the Web site’s robots.txt file and type this:

User-agent: Googlebot

Disallow: /

Mr. Sandoval works for a news organization dedicated to covering the tech beat.

At a minimum, he has an obligation to report that Murdoch does not know what he is talking about, though it should be noted that these comments are coming from all levels at Newscorp, and so a real journalist would show that it is clear that Murdoch is looking for is a legislative framework to both force Google (and search engines generally) to both carry his content, and pay to fulfill this requirement.

In relegating this to the final two paragraphs under “Google responds”, he somehow implies that there is a real issue here, as opposed to the truth, that Murdoch and Newscorp are basically Astroturfing for must carry/must pay legislation.