News Corp CEO Slams Facebook, Google for Not Sharing Enough Ad Revenue

He’s derided them as “bot-infested badlands,” “dysfunctional and sometimes dystopian,” and platforms for “the fake, the faux and the fallacious.” On a recent earnings call, he called them “mephitic,” prompting his spokesman to tweet the definition: “foul smelling.” No media executive has more tirelessly criticized Google and Facebook -- and done so with such a colorful vocabulary -- than News Corp Chief Executive Officer Robert Thomson. A top lieutenant of the billionaire media mogul Rupert Murdoch, Thomson uses alliterative attacks as part of a decade-long crusade to pressure Silicon Valley for a greater share of its advertising revenue. Now, Thomson, 56, is taking his campaign against Facebook a step further: He wants the social media giant to pay publishers for their content, the same way a cable TV company pays Walt Disney to carry ESPN. Once a lonely gadfly poking at tech giants like a modern Don Quixote, Thomson is now finding that other media executives publicly back his quest.