I am not sure people really understand what the Sky News spin-off means. If BSkyB were to spin off Sky News now, maintaining the current ownership arrangements, and then agreed a price with NewsCorp for selling the rest of the business, there would be no point of leverage for Hunt, Ofcom, the OFT or the opponents of the deal. So NewsCorp is simply making unilateral concessions to help Hunt survive the negative response to a deal he cannot halt.
Likewise, Ofcom’s desire to have a standing right to intervene in the media market is ill-considered. For instance, the Canadian regulatory authority insists on only having the right to intervene where a transaction is in prospect, so as a) not to penalise success and b) not inhibit the normal functioning of the market. Ofcom has shown itself less than adequate in measuring the media market it is meant to be regulating (see my paper), and would need to come up with far better measurement parameters before it could even begin to justify its proposal.
We also need to think why we want regulatory overview. The assumption that the BBC is outside the calculations ignores the significance of the BBC’s news agenda and story selection, which have impact even if the BBC is not trying explicitly to influence opinions and votes.
Conversely, we need to be clear why we worry about newspaper influence. The vast majority of stories in the serious newspapers are event driven, not agenda driven. Of course, many newspapers – notably the Star, Express, Mail, Sun, Mirror, Guardian and Telegraph – give great prominence to news (or “news”) that suits them politically, but that accounts for only a small percentage of their actual content. Moreover, we know that 56% of people regard newspapers as biased, so presumably don’t necessarily believe what they read.
So I think we need a) a much more sophisticated tracking of news stories to stand up the “undue influence” angle; b) a long-term analysis of TV news bulletins; and c) from the BBC complete transparency with relation to internal guidance memos and online access to every main bulletin over a rolling 12-month period. That way (and no doubt through many others) we might start to get a handle on why we want to intervene, never mind deciding the circumstances in which we would intervene.
For instance, if ITN closed down, would we say that ITV and Channel 4 could or could not obtain their news from Sky News (however its ownership stood)? If the Mirror continued its downward plummet, pushing the shares in a declining market of the Mail and News groups higher without their actually selling any more papers, would we want to intervene? And in what way? A forced sale?
David Elstein