Interesting to note that Sky News is using YouTube to host their entire “News Corp will block Google” interview with Murdoch…

…Picking up where Kathy left off this morning, The Guardian questions this Murdoch quote from that Sky News Australia interview:

“We have it already with the Wall Street Journal. We have a wall, but it’s not right to the ceiling. You can get, usually, the first paragraph from any story – but if you’re not a paying subscriber to WSJ.com all you get is a paragraph and a subscription form.”

The 78-year-old mogul’s assertion, however, is not actually correct: users who click through to screened WSJ.com articles from Google searches are usually offered the full text of the story without any subscription block. It is only users who find their way to the story through the Wall Street Journal’s website who are told they must subscribe before they can read further.

The man can be forgiven, I suppose, for misspeaking, but the twitter chatter has it that he just doesn’t understand how the WSJ handles Google News. For it, and the cockamamie cluelessness of his plan, he’s being widely ridiculed on the internets.

But, then, Murdoch must be used to that by now. From Michael Wolff — he literally wrote the book on Murdoch, you’ll remember — in this month’s Vanity Fair:

It is difficult not to sound catty when discussing News Corporation’s adventures with the Internet. But the litany of its failures—even more extreme than those of most other media companies that have struggled unsuccessfully online—is, I think, relevant to understanding exactly what Murdoch might really be trying to do.

From the failure of Delphi, one of the first public-access Internet providers, in 1993, to iGuide, the precursor to Yahoo and Google, which closed within months of its launch, to his son James’s aborted Internet-investing spree in the late 90s, to the great promise of MySpace, which was shortly flattened by Facebook, to the second launch of Pagesix.com, which Murdoch closed this year, after four months of operation, Murdoch’s Internet starts and stops have engendered at News Corp., in the description of Peter Bale, who once ran the Web site of The Times of London and now runs MSN in the U.K., a relative “fear or abhorrence of technology.”

Wolff goes on to recount the story of the time the founders of Google, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, visited Murdoch and his wife, Wendi, at their ranch in Carmel, California.

“You know, Rupert,” Wendi said, “he’s always asking questions.”

“But what,” I prodded, “did he exactly ask?”

“He asked,” she said, hesitating only a beat before cracking herself up, “‘Why don’t you read newspapers?’”

For its part, Google has clarified (again) that it will not index publishers against their wishes. ReadWriteWeb has a more nuanced take on the Sky News interview, calling it “deeply fascinating.” Think Progress headlines, Murdoch: Glenn Beck Was ‘Right’ To Say Obama Is ‘A Racist’ With ‘A Deep-Seated Hatred For White People,’ for this exchange:

SPEERS: The Glenn Beck, who you mentioned, has called Barack Obama a racist and he helped organize a protest against him. Others on Fox have likened him to Stalin. Is that defensible?

MURDOCH: No, no, no, not Stalin, I don’t think. I don’t know who that, not one of our people. On the racist thing, that caused a grilling. But he did make a very racist comment. Ahhh…about, you know, blacks and whites and so on, and which he said in his campaign he would be completely above. And um, that was something which perhaps shouldn’t have been said about the President, but if you actually assess what he was talking about, he was right.

Poor Rupert. He’s a real 20th century fellow. Meanwhile, his NYPost — which never made him any money anyway — has suffered circulation losses of nearly 30% in the past 2.5 years. And the announcement of a New York bureau for the WSJ has some at the Post on edge.