FUTURE Could Corbyn reintroduce ownership limits?

It is abundantly clear that a right-wing government able to rely on generally favourable coverage from a UK press which is also largely right-wing, and which has undermined the BBC's finances so radically, will have no desire to regulate on media ownership.

Quite the opposite: should we expect Murdoch to resurrect the buyout of the 60% of BSkyB shares his conglomerate doesn't own - so inconveniently halted by public outrage over his paper's phone hacking of Milly Dowler? Probably, yes; despite the protests of the Culture Select Committee and others, the Tory Culture Secretary was set to wave it through pre-Leveson.

Now we have a left-wing Labour leader, will there be a sharp end to the consensus over free market, laissez faire media regulation? Again, probably.

Corbyn has said little on this yet, but his one utterance directly attacked concentration of ownership and many perceive Murdoch's empire as a target.

Let's not forget that Tom Watson, who doggedly pursued News International and the phone hacking story even when directly threatened by the Murdoch press, and at the cost of his marriage, is now deputy leader.

The Blairite right-wing Labour MPs will doubtless argue that Labour needs to court the likes of the Mail and the S*n - after all, Tony himself flew out to Australia to genuflect before the great man in advance if the 1997 election.

Such arguments will surely now be rejected, and we can expect to see a sustained, vicious barrage of flak to shoot down this counter-hegemonic force.

The largely hostile coverage in the Guardian suggests that there might be friendly fire too, even if Greenslade thinks the paper will be neutral.

Greenslade also states that Corbyn has to become PM to change media policy, but that isn't necessarily so. We saw under the coalition government that the backbench Select Committee undertook the scrutiny that the responsible government minister, Jeremy Hunt, appeared reluctant to, including Watson famously describing James Murdoch as a Mafia boss.

With some cross-bench support (ie, Labour, Tory and others) its recommendations could still be enacted, though whether it will put forward any radical changes, other than eviscerating the BBC, does seem unlikely.

We have also seen plenty of examples of backbench bills getting close enough to passing to force government to act.

Whatever now happens, the cosy consensus and hegemony of deregulation will at least be up for debate, marking a distinct shift in 36 years of both major parties cutting media regulation.

Jeremy Corbyn versus the media - will he take on Murdoch? 

The current Tory Culture Secretary could face charges for leaking anti-BBC briefings to the Sunday Times: John Whittingdale accused of misleading parliament over BBC story in Sunday Times.

WIDER LAW: CONTEMPT Mail/Mirror fined (Milly Dowler case))

A good example of how wider law acts as a regulator: both the Mail + Mirror were fined (something the PCC didn't have the power to do, but its successor likely will) £10k each for their reporting on the now-convicted killer of Milly Dowler. Press reportage can be seen to influence jury decisions, so the media are not meant to report on live cases in such a way as to make a fair trial problematic.
As the article notes, there were other recent examples of this: 'In July last year, the Daily Mirror was fined £50,000 and the Sun £18,000 for articles on the arrest of Christopher Jefferies, who was later released without charge, in the Joanna Yates murder case. Vincent Tabak was found guilty of her murder in October 2011.'
This comes in the same month as Frankie Boyle won his libel case against the Mirror (called him a racist), being awarded £50k damages.

Daily Mail and Daily Mirror fined for contempt of court

Newspapers fined £10,000 each over coverage of Levi Bellfield's conviction for the abduction and murder of Milly Dowler

• Josh Halliday
• guardian.co.uk, Monday 22 October 2012 16.16 BST

The Daily Mail and Daily Mirror have been fined £10,000 each for breaching contempt of court laws. Photograph: Alamy

The Daily Mail and Daily Mirror have been fined £10,000 each, and ordered to pay £25,000 apiece in costs, for breaching contempt of court laws with their coverage of Levi Bellfield's conviction for the abduction and murder of Milly Dowler.
The two newspapers were found guilty of contempt of court in July after two senior judges said their coverage risked serious prejudice to Bellfield's trial.
Sir John Thomas and Mr Justice Tugendhat last week ordered the Daily Mail and Daily Mirror to pay £10,000 each, plus £25,000 apiece in costs.
However, reporting restrictions meant the fines could not be made public until after the verdict in comedian Frankie Boyle's libel trial against the Daily Mirror had been delivered on Monday. Boyle won his case against the Daily Mirror and was awarded more than £50,000 in damages.
The Bellfield articles were published by the Daily Mirror and Daily Mail on the day after his conviction for the murder and abduction of Milly Dowler, while the jury was considering another charge on the attempted kidnapping of Rachel Cowles.
The articles contained background information about Bellfield, which the high court said went far beyond what the jury had been told in court.
The Daily Mirror reported allegations of Bellfield's violent treatment and sexual abuse of his ex-wife and a former partner, and an allegation that he had once boasted of raping a disabled girl.
Sir John Thomas, high court judge and president of the Queen's Bench division, said: "Bearing in mind the amount of costs paid, we can take the course in this case of fining each newspaper at the very bottom end of the scale, namely £10,000 each.
"But for the future the message is clear and the court's observations, we hope, will ensure others exercise the most scrupulous care at the critical time in a case where only some verdicts have been returned and others remain outstanding."
Both the Daily Mirror and Daily Mail expressed surprise and disappointment at the contempt verdict in July.
They questioned whether their coverage had an adverse impact on a jury which had already found Bellfield guilty of two murders.
In July last year, the Daily Mirror was fined £50,000 and the Sun £18,000 for articles on the arrest of Christopher Jefferies, who was later released without charge, in the Joanna Yates murder case. Vincent Tabak was found guilty of her murder in October 2011.

Prescott says Twitter stronger than PCC

The post title doesn't quite sum up former Labour deputy-PM John Prescott's argument, which is a very, very useful one as it

• brings up issues around digitisation ...
• and the decline of newspaper circulation (there are 10m UK Twitter accounts, while 9m papers are sold each day)
• the failures of the PCC, and how Twitter users are more effective than it: he compares his experience of complaining about a Photoshopped image used to brand him as a 'champagne socialist' (he was drinking a bottle of beer which was cropped out of the shot) - it took weeks to get an apology - with a June 2011 story in The Sunday Times about him criticising new Labour leader Miliband: he tweeted that this was simply a made-up lie, and within HOURS The Sunday Times issued an apology
• the failure of the press to carry out its democratic function as a 'fourth estate'
• ...not least over the refusal of the press to report the Guardian's revelations about phone hacking until after the Milly Dowler revelations led to the closure of the NoTW - he says it was the incessant discussion of this on Twitter that ensured the Guardian's reporting eventually had an impact
• he also notes the role of advertisers: it was after a growing number of big-name companies announced they would cease advertising in the NoTW that it was closed
• fundamentally, he argues that Twitter enables the people to carry out the scrutinising role, holding politicians to account, that the press/media are traditonally meant to

Here's what he said on http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2012/may/15/life-is-tweet-john-prescott:

Life is tweet, says John Prescott, as Twitter reaches 10m milestone in UK

Twitter has helped shift the balance of media power from press barons to the people – a true champagne moment

• 
• • John Prescott
  • guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 15 May 2012
  • Comments (97)

John Prescott says the 10,000,000th UK Twitter subscriber is a milestone and a true champagne moment. Photograph: Andrew Winning/Reuters

Tuesday marked a turning point for the UK mainstream media. The combined total of people who buy daily national newspapers is 9,002,963. The number of people on Twitter in the UK is now 10 million.
Where once press barons were courted by politicians and PRs, the people have now established their own media. It costs nothing, is faster than mainstream media and galvanises people into action.
Back in 1996, I went to a do with Pauline. A photographer took a picture of us at our table. The following day the London Evening Standard ran a picture with the caption "champagne socialist".
There was no bottle of champagne at our table – the paper had cropped the picture to make a bottle of Becks look like a bottle of Moët. Another beer near my hand was airbrushed out completely.
I complained but, after a few days, I'd heard nothing. So I released a statement which was published in the Independent and, eventually after weeks, I received an apology from the Standard.
In June 2011, the Sunday Times wrongly reported I had told "friends" that my party's new leader had not made "a good start" to his leadership. The headline read "Labour Big Beasts Maul Ed Miliband".
I tweeted: "I see there's a quote purporting to be from me in the Sunday Times. It's completely made up. An absolute lie."
Within an hour, the paper replied "Due to a prod[uction] error a quote was wrongly attributed to @johnprescott. We apologise for the confusion & are happy to set the record straight."
Both stories illustrate how power in the media has shifted dramatically. Twitter has created an important and speedy check on our newspapers – a role the Press Complaints Commission (PCC) failed miserably to fulfil – and finally made press barons accountable to the people.
Even Rupert Murdoch, who vented his spleen in Sun editorials, realised the power shift and cut out the middleman by finally joining Twitter in January.

The Jan Moir Twitter storm about her terrible Daily Mail piece on Stephen Gately's "sleazy" death led to thousands of tweeters, myself included, posting the link to officially complain to the PCC. A record 25,000 did and Moir was forced to apologise.

Twitter users also bombarded News of the World's advertisers after accusations it had hacked Milly Dowler's phone. O2, Boots, Halifax, Dixons, Sainsbury's, the Co-op, npower and Ford all withdrew their advertising and the paper was closed within a week.

Social media also helped set up the Leveson inquiry. While very few media outlets covered the Guardian's original phone-hacking investigations in 2009 in any detail, it was kept alive on Twitter as new information emerged.

They wouldn't let it lie and the mainstream media were ultimately compelled to investigate the story, leading to a critical mass of public anger and official action.

Twitter is OUR media, the public have become the news editors and the Twitter trend list is the running order.

It's given me a voice and a connection to millions of people that the distorted prism of the mainstream media denied.
So for me, life is tweet. Though it would be even tweeter if they verified me.
LOL!
• John Prescott is the former deputy prime minister. He joined Twitter on 22 January 2009 and presently has almost 132,000 followers.