By Brad King, Assistant Professor
Ball State University
From the Series: Tech Meme

Rupert Murdoch raised quite a stir in the publishing world when he announced last month that he would, in the near future, remove his company's news content from Google. His reasoning: Google is stealing, making money off headlines, decks and images, which ultimately hurts his bottom line since people aren't viewing that content on his company's sites.

In December, the news industry fired another salvo when Murdoch's News Corp. and four other media conglomerates announced the formation of a joint venture to develop a digital publishing platform for the Web and the emerging e-Reader market. This followed the Hearst Corp., one of the companies involved in Murdoch's conglomerate, attempting to push its Skiff e-Reader software to e-Reader devices in 2010.

That Google - and the rest of the technology world - didn't blink any of these ideas is telling. Google, in fact, quickly unveiled an easy solution that would allow any publisher to remove its content immediately from search. So far, none have.

Clearly the publishers, who are hemorrhaging money, have to do something. Fast. A looming cloud of doom hovers above every news organization, fueled by all manner of demons, some real and some imagined. And in this chaotic time it's difficult to suss out which is which.

In uncertain times, people want easy answers. Increasingly that looks to mean a showdown between news companies and technology companies.

Magazine advertisements and television commercials for cosmetics and personal hygiene products in India illustrate a cultural bias toward lighter skin, according to the findings of a study published in the fall 2009 issue of Journalism and Communication Monographs.

In their monograph, "Melanin on the Margins: Advertising and the Cultural Politics of Fair/Light/White Beauty in India," Radhika Parameswaran and Kavitha Cardoza first provide context for "colorism," or skin color discrimination, in India. They explain that the nineteenth century colonial attitudes that considered the science of race looked at physical characteristics of natives in order to prove their inferiority. Likewise, colorism has roots in the caste system of India, as well as in the country's ancient history when lighter-skinned tribes invaded around 1500 B.C... READ IT