Media: Ownership

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Puttnam, on the topicality of this debate, his excellent speech and the work that he has done in this area, not least on the Communications Act 2003. Because of his initiative we are able to debate media ownership today and if there are any outstanding questions, they can be cleared up in the Question I will ask next Thursday. We learnt this morning that Dr Vince Cable has decided to refer to Ofcom the News Corporation bid for full control of BSkyB. It is suggested that a number of Conservatives are unhappy with that decision. I do not know who these unnamed people are but I think that this is an excellent decision, made even better by the fact that it was taken so speedily. I congratulate the Secretary of State on that. It means that in this debate we can get down to the question of where the public interest lies in this and similar cases. I should like to make three points. First, I believe that the news media have a vital role in a democracy. They report news from home and overseas and can expose injustice and challenge officialdom and any Government. Healthy media set out a whole range of views. It follows that a media concentrated in too few hands can have the effect of limiting freedom of expression and diversity of view—the hallmark of a democratic state—and can give too much power to a company or individual. I add a warning to those mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Puttnam. We need to treat with caution rivals who make the public interest case. In this case, News Corporation is opposed by a coalition of newspapers and the BBC. I suspect that some of the newspapers would dearly like to have the market position of Mr Murdoch while the BBC is not perhaps in the strongest position to talk about market dominance given its political influence and the enormously strong position of radio news. Above all, we should remember the special interests of the political parties, which are not so much concerned about excessive power as that that power should support them. In this case, there is a nice choice for the political managers between backing News Corporation or one of the prominent members of the coalition opposing it—the Daily Mail. All this means that there is an overwhelming need for independent judgment to be exercised on these issues, which underlines the importance of the Communications Select Committee. Its justification must be its independence, which it needs to be fearless in exerting. I therefore welcome this case being put to the independent judgment of Ofcom. My second point is that we do not need to speculate about the views of Mr Murdoch. He set them out frankly to the Communications Select Committee. We were well ahead on this issue a couple of years ago, when we interviewed him in New York. On the position of Sky News, he said it would be more popular if, in style, it were more like the Fox News channel in the United States. Why was that not the case, we asked? According to Mr Murdoch: "““Nobody at Sky listens to me””." That presumably would not be a problem when full control is taken. On the control over his newspapers, he was again frank. On the Sun and the News of the World, he said he was what he called the traditional proprietor, exercising control on major issues such as which party to back in a general election. As for the control of ownership, he was entirely scathing; he believed that Britain was 10 years out of date, given that there were so many news outlets for the public to choose from. That brings me to my third and last point. Does the growth of the internet mean that ownership in this area can be left to the market? I do not believe that it does, for the following reason. All surveys show that the main source of news in the United Kingdom is television —74 per cent of the population rely on it—behind that are newspapers, the radio, and finally the internet, at 6 per cent. That may well change, but that is how things stand. Nor do I buy the argument that because News Corporation owns almost 40 per cent of the shares of BSkyB, nothing will change if it takes full control. Self-evidently, full control means just that. The issue here is that Mr Murdoch’s company already owns newspapers which account for 37 per cent of national newspaper sales in this country. The company now wants to take full control of BSkyB, whose revenue is greater than that of the BBC. The case for this being brought in and reviewed independently is overwhelming, and I am one of those who believes that the public interest is not served by this bid going ahead.