YNOT — Love him or hate him, Rupert Murdoch may well be one of the most powerful men in the world. Personally, I choose to hate; but then, I’ve never been a fan of one man holding too much power over the lives of other people. Doesn’t it always seem like the wrong people manage to maneuver themselves into these positions of power? Murdoch hasn’t even blinked while turning his powerful reach into a well-oiled propaganda machine for the world’s aristocracy. Simply put, I believe Fox News works very hard to keep its viewers uninformed, ignorant and therefore easily manipulated for profit.In the last decade, Rupert Murdoch has driven his partisan conservative Fox News to the top of the charts, knocking former leader CNN to third and creating the conditions for its primary challenger, MSNBC, to thrive with its own brand of partisan talk television. Thanks to Fox News, the rare politician who is interested in restoring some resemblance of power to the general population of America will have a far-reaching and powerful political machine fighting him or her every step of the way. We’ve seen that with health care, and we’ll continue to see it with any other issue that helps working class people gain some kind of leverage over the aristocrats who run these absurdly powerful multi-national corporations in industries that are vital to modern human society.

Although Fox News is the most visible card that Murdoch holds, recent changes in the rules governing ownership of the media has allowed the Australian businessman to dominate to a dangerous level; his company also owns influential properties like the Wall Street Journal, the NY Post, the Sun, and of course 20th Century Fox. On the Internet, Newscorp has built a portfolio of sites that include MySpace.com, RottenTomatoes.com, GameSpy.com, and countless others. Put all of these pieces together and you start to get a sense of the Godzilla-sized megaphone Murdoch’s company has at its disposal.

Given this, it’s hard for me to be sympathetic with anything the man has to say; but I do find myself somewhat divided when reading his recent comments on the Internet’s impact on the news media.

“The people who simply just pick up everything and run with it – steal our stories, we say they steal our stories – they just take them,” he said recently in an interview with Sky News Australia. “That’s Google, that’s Microsoft, that’s Ask.com, a whole lot of people … they shouldn’t have had it free all the time, and I think we’ve been asleep.”

Murdoch is upset that sites like Google News can post part of a news story and then link to the source for the full story – an approach that has been used on Internet websites for as long as I can remember. In fact, the original YNOT.com approach to news was to simply link to other sites carrying stories of interest rather than develop our own unique news content, which takes more resources. The abundance of “free” news on the Internet has fewer people subscribing to newspapers or news services – why pay for what one can get so easily for free – and since online ad sales aren’t picking up all the slack for many traditional media companies, Murdoch isn’t alone in wondering what the future of information might look like on the Internet.

Anyone who operates a website that has been hurt by competitors who give away the farm should understand what has Murdoch’s blood boiling. Operators of adult websites know this lesson all too well; profits were obscene until casual consumers of porn discovered that they could find everything they wanted for free, without paying. Producing quality content for the Internet is a job for most people, and receiving financial compensation for the work allows those who do it the ability to invest the kind of time that makes the content they produce worthwhile. Just like an adult content company has to pay models and photographers and post-production specialists to ensure a quality product, so too do news organizations have to pay writers and editors and research assistants and other expenses if they hope to produce end results that are valuable to readers.

Something has to give, eventually. If the major news companies can’t make enough money to survive and thrive off the sale of advertisements that means the reader either has to pay or see the quality and reliability of the information they consume begin to suffer.

It’s clear that Murdoch is planning to fight this battle in the coming years – if not in 2010, then possibly 2011. The Wall Street Journal already has made a strong push for subscribers, and Murdoch has said that he’s willing to ban Google entirely from Newscorp sites once paid subscription models are completely in place. No telling if that’s a bluff, but he did say such a move wasn’t yet imminent.

So keep an eye on efforts to promote information subscription sites in the coming years. If the history of the Internet says anything about this battle, the companies who play to ask for subscription fees might have an uphill battle in most cases. Nonetheless, I think Murdoch’s comments indicate that the old school media giants are spending a lot of time these days trying to find a way to get the dollars of news consumers back under their control.