Media: Ownership

Lord Razzall Excerpts

Thursday 4th November 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Razzall]

My Lords, in thanking the noble Lord, Lord Puttnam, for introducing this extremely important debate, let me give him the undertaking he asked for. There has been no diminution whatever in the Liberal Democrats’ commitment on this issue; indeed, various colleagues of mine regard this as a significant marker for our involvement in the coalition. I can certainly reassure the noble Lord on that point.

The Liberal Democrat position is not based simply on Murdoch bashing, which has become quite fashionable. Mr Murdoch ought to be congratulated on at least two major achievements since he became involved in our media. First, although I do not know whether everyone on the Labour side agrees, his destruction of militant trade unionism on Fleet Street resulted in the much cheaper production of newspapers. Secondly, he bet his personal financial house on the creation of satellite TV. Everyone thought he was mad when he started that, and his significant financial commitment has resulted in the multiplicity of channels that we see today.

However, the Secretary of State’s decision to ask Ofcom to investigate the public interest consideration of media plurality arising from the proposed bid is clearly right. One of the problems with this issue is that defining media plurality can be “somewhat nebulous”, as the department is on record as saying. So I will, in the time available, give four or five reasons why we think this proposal goes too far.

The first is BSkyB’s strength in broadcast news. Sky News is now one of only three television news providers in the UK, supplying its own channels and Channel 5. It is virtually the only commercial news supplier for radio. We have seen what it has done to ITV news. When it bid in 2001 to provide ITV’s news, ITN was forced to reduce its bid by 25 per cent, which many of us believe resulted in a significant diminution in value, and a dumbing down, of ITV news.

Secondly, BSkyB has a stranglehold over the pay-TV market. It has an unchallengeable dominance in prime sporting rights, it dominates the market in pay-TV rights for films and it has just secured exclusive access to all HBO programming. BSkyB restricts access by other platforms to its premium channels and controls non-public sector broadcast access to satellite and content. That in itself should be a reason to look at this proposal with care.

Thirdly, as a number of noble Lords have said, News Corporation has a dominant position in the national press. One speaker quoted Enders predicting that News Corp’s market share would rise to more than 40 per cent by 2014. The reason is that the Murdoch-owned press, which can absorb losses, will gain market share while smaller and more vulnerable companies will be forced to make significant cost savings to survive.

Fourthly, full control of BSkyB will entrench a dominant economic and editorial position, providing News Corp with the financial resources to sustain its newspapers for the long term. Once in that position, it can do all sorts of things, ranging from cover price discounting, bundling in a much broader manner, or offering print and digital editions of the Sun or Times to Sky subscribers. It does not require a fertile imagination to think about what other things could happen with this exercise of media power.

The defence coming from News Corp will be that we should not worry about the dominance of Sky News because of the partiality or impartiality rules that apply, and that when Mr Murdoch says that he wishes Sky News could be like Fox, we do not need to worry because of those rules. However, the rules offer adequate protection only against systematic and blatant promotion of a one-sided political view. They are incapable of dealing with stories that are simply excluded, or with more subtle examples of editorial influence, so I do not believe that they can deal with this potential problem.

Finally, media plurality is still an issue for our democracy. Although some suggest that plurality considerations are vitiated by the proliferation of online social networking and other news sources, these arguments fail to understand the nature of news gathering and the continuing pivotal role of the press and television in setting the agenda. This story has a long way to run.