In light of ITV’s $300 million buyout of UK community site Friends Reunited. There is something deeply comical about the spectacle of old-media companies trying to engage with this new-fangled internet thingy, says John Naughton.

“Television people are constitutionally incapable of dealing with the web because they have been socially and professionally conditioned in the world of ‘push’ media with its attendant control freakery and inbuilt assumptions about the passivity and stupidity of audiences. Very little of their experience or skills are useful in a ‘pull’ medium like the web, where the consumer is active, fickle and informed, and history to date suggests that if they are put in charge of internet operations they screw up.”