News Corp, which among many, many other things owns Fox Broadcasting and MySpace, has acquired Beliefnet, perhaps the largest website devoted religion and spirituality. I’m a little worried for Beliefnet, which really does seem fair and balanced (it’s one of the only popular religion sites that, from my limited experience, treats unbelievers with the same respect as believers).
Apparently, News Corp’s already in the religion business–it owns Zondervan and Harper Collins (which prints a lot of scholarly as well as popular religious studies books, including critical stuff by Crossan, Spong, Borg, etc). As much as I avoid TV and other broadcast media, it’s sobering to discover how much of my information comes from something touched by Murdoch–from the critical books that shape my approach to religion to the little news blurbs I monitor daily.
1 response so far ↓
1 xJane // Dec 5, 2007 at 1:53 pm
You know, I saw that the other day & it’s been so long since I’ve felt comfortable at Beliefnet that I didn’t really feel much sorrow. When I first started hanging out there, there was a big Pagan community and a lot of support for people “between” religions or who were having doubts. The longer I stayed, though, the more it swung toward monotheism, then toward Religions Of The Book, then toward Chrisitanity. This may very well have been a result of the readership, but it was still disheartening. I decided to get my Christianity from actual Christian sources & did the same for Paganism. When I lost my data last month, most of my passwords went, too, so I’d need to reregister at Beliefnet (in the past, I still went back occassionally to check it out), which I don’t really think I’m going to do. I may keep an eye on it in the coming months to see how it might change, but I really can’t imagine how much worse it can get than it is now…
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