Rupert Murdoch to White House: No free news

The Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal has jacked up the rate it charges the Administration's news clipping service by a jaw-dropping $600,000 per year — and is steering the White House towards a direct deal with News Corp's Factiva aggregation service.

It's unclear how News Corp. arrived at the $600,000 figure. But copyright laws would prevent the news-clipping service from widely disseminating Wall Street Journal articles without the parent company''s permission. For the past decade, Democratic and Republican administrations alike have paid a small Virginia-based media company $100,000 or more each year to prepare customized packages of excerpts from print, TV, radio and blog outlets. Bulletin News of Reston performs the labor-intensive searches (which would otherwise require the hiring of government staff) every night starting at 9 p.m., delivering a package of article extracts and Web links to the West Wing by 5 a.m. each morning. The Journal, which sits behind a licensed pay wall, has always been part of the package -- until now. Earlier this month, a Bulletin News executive informed the White House of the fee increase, which appears to have been motivated by Murdoch's business model, not his conservative politics.