Now HERE'S A Good Idea--Not!

I am a big fan of FAIR (Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting). They have a cool blog that delivers bite-sized, easily digested nuggets of frequently sardonic, snarky analysis of crap the CorpoRat Media tries to pull. Witness what they posted earlier today (with the nice Shakespearean allusion; I lurv smart media people.)

The First Thing We Do, Let's Kill All the Search Engines
05/19/2009 by Jim Naureckas

Corporate media's arguments against Google are getting stranger and stranger. While previously the Washington Post had accused the search engine of "vacuum[ing] up their content without paying a dime," now the Post has media lawyers Bruce Sanford and Bruce Brown (5/16/09) charging that search engines "crawl the Web and ingest everything in their path."

Can anything be done to stop these terrifying monsters? Yes, the two Bruces say--you could change the law to require search engines to "obtain copyright permissions in order to copy and index websites." Given that the point of this would be to force search engines to "negotiate with copyright holders over the value of their content"--that is, with millions of copyright holders located all over the world--this would likely eliminate all problems associated with search engines...by eliminating search engines. Then I'm sure we'd have a golden age of journalism once again. (Emphasis supplied)

There is, of course, one other thing they could do: Stop wasting bandwidth by ceasing to put their crapulent shit up on the web. Ya think?

(PS: Just from a glance at the wear on the letters on my keyboard, I'd have to say the letters "a," "e," "r," "t," "o," and "n" are the most often typed letters in the universe; the "s" key is worn, but only distantly as much as the former few...)