OWNERSHIP Leveson 2 n Murdoch sunk as Comcast seeks Sky

A name which may be familiar from its ownership of NBC-Universal, Comcast has launched a shock bid to usurp Murdoch's long-planned full takeover of Sky, the most lucrative arm of his now fragmenting global empire. Just as there are questions about the ethics and fitness of the Murdoch conglomerate, Comcast brings with it a tarnished reputation for behaviour that both Chomsky and Ben Bagdikian would recognise as predictable from their models:

Comcast, which last week unveiled a £22bn offer for Sky, has been labelled the “worst company in America” twice in recent years over shoddy customer service and pricing. It has also been involved in regulatory transgressions which legal experts believe means its plan to take over Sky should be closely scrutinised by watchdogs.
The pay-TV firm, which is poised to formalise its bid to try to steal Sky from under Rupert Murdoch’s nose, announced a $300m plan to spruce up customer service three years ago, but to little avail so far. Comcast was named “America’s most-hated company” in a respected customer satisfaction survey last year.

(Guardian: Sky bidder Comcast labelled 'worst company in America')

I'm picking up on points linked to Comcast, but this is a useful primer on the perceived failings of the latest press regulator, IPSO.

This comes just as Murdoch seemed to have won a vital victory, with the Tory government announcing they have rejected calls (including from an angry Leveson himself) to launch the 2nd stage of the Leveson Inquiry. This was part of their originally announced plans as fury swept the UK over the NoTW phone-hacking scandal - with the Tory government under huge pressure to do so given the presence of Andy Coulson, sacked NoTW editor, in the centre of government as then-PM Cameron's press advisor. 

NB: Hancock = current UK Culture Secretary, so oversees media policy.

Just two days before Hancock’s announcement, the Murdoch family’s long-held ambitions to own the whole of Sky faced a far mightier opponent than a government with a wafer thin majority. Comcast, a telecoms and entertainment giant valued by the market at some $184bn (£130bn) – more than twice the value of 21st Century Fox – looks set to outfox the man who started Sky in 1989 and built it into Europe’s most significant satellite television platform. By offering 16% more to Sky shareholders, who have been waiting for over a year while competition regulators agonise over the possibility of increasing Murdoch’s dominance, Comcast has highlighted that market economics can trump media power.

 

The appearance of a huge US business, the owner of NBC television and Universal Studios, to spoil Murdoch’s takeover plans, shores up his argument for a merger with Disney. Despite the local power held by his newspapers – which is largely unchanged – the Murdoch media empire is relatively small compared with the Apples and Amazons of the world. Comcast makes a fortune from telecommunications in the US but revenues from the rest of its business are just 9% of its total.

 

In this game of superscale, Murdoch’s desire to control Sky has twice been held up by regulatory questions over the behaviour of his employees: first through phone hacking, then with sexual harassment allegations. It’s worth pointing out that Comcast, like so many media groups, has been tarnished by the latter: its television network NBC fired its best known presenter Matt Lauer amid harassment allegations last year.

(Guardian: Leveson 2 is off but relations between press and power are little changed)

CONCENTRATION OF OWNERSHIP due to Google Facebook ad dominance

The newspaper industry has been based on ad revenue since the scrapping of stamp duty (tax) in 1851 led to a sharp increase in professionalism, with production (and distribution) costs exceeding revenue from cover price. As Curran and Seaton argue in great detail in Power Without Responsibility, this led to a mass closure of ‘radical press’ titles and consolidation and concentration of ownership by wealthy individuals who pursued right-wing agendas such as low business taxes and attacking trade unions/workers rights.

The modern-day online migration of ad revenue (one major consequence of disruption from digitisation, the other being the youth market almost disappearing as a paid-for print media market: steep circulation decline) is an important factor in any possible change to press regulation.

The industry is struggling for survival, so tougher regulation, especially that proposed by Impress, linked to the Royal Charter idea that Leveson proposed, which would see newspapers routinely charged for the legal fees of accusers even if their complaints were ultimately rejected, could result in mass closure and a further loss of pluralism.

Guardian: Newsquest targets Archant as newspaper consolidation gathers pace.

“Consolidation is inevitable,” Ashley Highfield, chief executive of Johnston Press, owner of the Scotsman and Yorkshire Post, said last week. “It’s the obvious and necessary road ahead and smaller publishers increasingly cannot survive without being part of bigger groups to bring economies of scale and shared content.”
Last year, Johnston Press, the UK’s second-biggest regional newspaper group, paid Evgeny Lebedev, owner of the Evening Standard and Independent websites, £24m for national newspaper the i to bulk up the publisher’s scale. It also was one of a number of suitors, including Lebedev, to look at buying national freesheet Metro when DMGT, which owns the Daily Mail, tested market appetite for a sale.

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The shift of readers away from printed newspapers, which have traditionally provided the bulk of revenues and profits through sales and advertising, has been profound over the last decade.
Total weekly regional newspaper circulation fell by half from 42m to 22m between 2009 and 2016 , with paid-for copies falling from 26m to 13.8m, according to Enders Analysis. Similarly, the national newspaper market has shrunk from selling 9.3m copies per day in 2009 to 5.2m last year.
On Tuesday, investors in Trinity Mirror, the publisher of the Mirror titles, will vote to approve a £200m takeover of Richard Desmond’s Express and Star titles as the national newspaper industry faces the same issue of the need to build scale to survive in the battle for advertising against the tech giants.
The impact on publishers’ bottom line has been further affected by lower rates for digital advertising, exacerbated by giants such as Facebook and Google hoovering up to 90% of all new ad money being spent online.
Since 2008, almost £800m in ad spend has been stripped from national newspapers, from £1.54bn in 2008 to £757m last year. The impact is even more stark in regional newspapers, which have seen ad revenue fall from £2bn in 2008 to £723m last year, according to figures from Group M.
“In order to survive, consolidation is key to compete with the online players and retain some share of digital advertising,” says Alice Pickthall, media analyst at Enders.
“As the digital market grows, publishers aren’t seeing a proportionate amount of share gain. Facebook has had an especially big impact on the local market. If a local business is offered a lovely shiny [presence] on Facebook who wouldn’t use it? The largest [traditional] players in the market will win, they will continue to pick up smaller publishers to maintain scale in a shrinking market.”

PRESS FLAK Czechmate for right-wing attack on leftie leader

Guardian included 1 of Corbyn's popular (with younger aud) online vids

Jeremy Corbyn was accused by right-wing papers of being a Soviet spy - an absurd story that was quickly proved false, but led to massive TV and radio coverage. Remember this if exploring the proposition that circulation decline means the loss of press power over politics and public opinion; listeners and viewers who never pick up a newspaper are exposed to their agenda as the broadcast media routinely take their news agenda from the papers.

The story very clearly showed up the current binary approach between Labour (left) and Tory (right) parties:

[Corbyn accused] rightwing papers of being controlled by billionaire tax exiles, with the party repeating that it planned to hold a media ownership review if it got into power, and sending a lawyer’s letter to a Tory MP over an ill-judged tweet.The Conservatives, meanwhile, have sought to stoke the row in an attempt to get it picked up by broadcasters – while at the same time trying to pretend they are above the fray by arguing, none too subtly, that it is the party that supports the press and the existing structure of independent regulation. [Guardian 'spying row' article]

Clause 1 of the Editors Code (Accuracy) appears to have taken a typical battering, free of consequence or censure from the regulator, with the right-wing press' combined attempted assault on Opposition leader Corbyn. Branded a traitor and a spy, his response has been to go on the attack, promise Leveson part 2 (the PM has taken the opposite stance), and action to tackle the lack of diversity of ownership, characterised as 'billionaire tax exiles'.

Labour and Corbyn are calculating that by using social media they will win this battle and thwart the attempted character assassination, with only older voters significantly influenced by the press. A bold volte face for a party which slavishly sought press favour under Blair's, who notoriously flew to Australia before becoming PM for a meeting with Murdoch.

Corbyn's 2018 Labour are calculating that the declining press industry is losing its grip on public opinion and are using social media to distribute short videos, quotes etc to engage with a primarily youth audience to counter the mainstream media discourse and flak that he faces.

They did, though, also turn to the law - a legal letter forced a Tory MP to delete a libellous anti-Corbyn tweet, apologise and make a charitable donation.

Tony Blair and Gordon Brown wooed the press, long maintaining personal relationships with Rupert Murdoch and Paul Dacre respectively, while in No 10. But personal attacks on Corbyn motivate the party’s supporters, particularly younger voters, who don’t read the Sun, Mail or Telegraph, and who don’t necessarily remember the cold war.Ed Miliband broke with the Murdoch press in 2011 following the phone-hacking scandal, promising to break up the Sun and Times empire if he was elected. A controversial attack on his Marxist father Ralph, described by the Daily Mail as “the man who hates Britain” led to a furious row with Dacre’s newspaper in 2013. But if both moves were popular at the time, he nevertheless was badly beaten in the 2015 election.

The PM (May) used the story in PMQs, and later pontificated on the free press

“A free press is one of the foundations on which our democracy is built,” in an attempt to claim a moral high ground.Labour ... repeat[ed] that the party wanted to carry out the second part of the Leveson inquiry into press regulation and insisting that its media review would aim to boost diversity in British media, without specifying any details as to how.In doing so, it risked entrenching an already adversarial relationship with the rightwing press – but the Labour calculus is that, except possibly with older voters, in the social media era that does not matter.

Guardian: Spying row: how Corbyn seized chance to take on the Sun.

LEVESON buried as government goes for Google

UPDATE: Former Labour Leader Ed Miliband (or 'Red Ed' as the right-wing red-tops would have it of this very 'centrist', at least politician who opposes Jeremy Corbyn's left-wing policies) has called for Leveson2 to happen.

Great quote on IPSO - he wasn't impressed when the Mail branded his father a traitor. He tweeted and gave media interviews to counter that rather than trying IPSO.

The Leveson inquiry must be completed. The victims of phone-hacking deserve nothing less

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/may/08/victims-phone-hacking-leveson-inquiry?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Copy_to_clipboard

UPDATE2 A vote could back Impress as the compulsory regulator, and another make papers pay legal costs whether they win or lose any case.  

Government faces possible defeat on press regulation votes

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2018/may/08/government-facing-possible-defeat-in-press-regulation-votes?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Copy_to_clipboard

Nor can we take comfort from the response to Leveson part one. The press declined to set up the kind of independent regulator that both Leveson and parliament wanted to see. Instead we have Ipso, a toothless organisation that, despite bold promises, has yet to impose a single fine or deliver a single equal prominence front-page correction in a national paper. There are also significant issues around the lack of rules or redress around much of the news on social media.

Greenslade's view that the press inquiry announced by UK PM May marks the death, or at least the long-term parking (surely a Labour victory would see Leveson resurrected?) of Leveson2 seems about right.

His Guardian column is occasional rather than daily these days but always worth looking out for. As a former national newspaper editor himself he reliably skewers the realities of this cantankerous industry and it's billionaire figureheads, gladhanded as they are by regimes of a non-socialist bent.

Interesting that the press' extreme aversion to political scrutiny means it mostly failed to imbue May with lavish praise for meeting a long-term demand, an inquiry into the leeching of the new media titans of press content and finance.

This is, nonetheless, a strong sign of the press' continuing current grip over their ideologically matched right-wing Tory government. Obvious echoes here of the timid burial of Calcutt2 nearly 30 years ago when a declining Tory government took years to respond to Calcutt's demand for a new review, as agreed in his original report, when he noted that press behaviour had not substantially altered, then quietly announced there would be no such review.

Here's a snippet:

For years, they have been calling for something to be done about Google and Facebook, arguing that both steal their content while luring away their advertisers. The result has been falling profits for “old media” and consequent closures of regional and local titles accompanied by a sizeable reduction in the number of journalists, rightly described by May as “a hollowing-out of newsrooms”.

This is hardly a new story, and there has been plenty of political lobbying from publishing organisations in order to persuade the government that their industry’s decline requires attention.

These pleas for action have been couched in terms of a warning that the nation is in danger of losing its “free press”, which, to quote the Daily Mail, therefore represents an “insidious threat to British democracy”. A free press, eh? Would that be the press owned and controlled by rich men – yes, men – or profiteering conglomerates that have been propagandists for a “free market” and opposed all regulatory intervention?

Would that be the free press that has traditionally championed business competition and praised the virtue of technological innovation in other industries where jobs have been wiped out?

It was noticeable that May also ignored such ironies when contending that the decline of newspapers is “dangerous for our democracy” and that the loss of “trusted and credible news sources” makes us “vulnerable to news which is untrustworthy”.

Given that untrustworthy news has been the stock in trade of national titles like the Mail for generations it was hard not to laugh at her disingenuousness.

Guardian: Is May’s press inquiry just a way of putting Leveson 2 on the back burner?

LEVESON Lords vote for more power and EU law

In the face of strong government opposition, the UK's second chamber, the House of Lords, voted in favour of adopting further Leveson recommendations to pressure any press not signed up to a recognised regulator. This would mean those papers would have to pay all libel action legal costs and risk higher damages payments too.

Campaigners for tougher press regulation, including the opposition party, Labour whose deputy leader Tom Watson is largely responsible for persisting and forcing phone hacking, then Leveson, onto the agenda, alongside The Guardian (which was attacked by the then regulator, the PCC, for it's 'false' reporting!!), welcomed the vote. The Culture Secretary (from the Tory party) condemned it as an attack on press freedom.

The vote also said yes to bringing in EU data protection law.

As I've pointed out before, this strand of Leveson shows how difficult it is to balance the need for much more effective regulation with democratic press freedom and the economic vulnerability of the press at a time when circulation is collapsing and Google/Facebook are swallowing up ever more of the as revenue that largely pays for the press. The S*n just this week posted extraordinary losses.

Matt Hancock: Lords' Leveson 'yes' vote is blow to local press https://www.theguardian.com/media/2018/jan/11/matt-hancock-lords-leveson-yes-vote-is-blow-to-local-press?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Blogger

The new culture secretary: besides loving Galway Girl, what do we know about Matt Hancock?

https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2018/jan/10/who-is-new-culture-minister-matt-hancock?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Copy_to_clipboard
New DCMS Minister profiled, and the Culture Minister role and challenges explained.

Sun newspaper posts huge annual loss.
Sun makes £24m loss amid print ad slump and phone-hacking costs
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2018/jan/10/sun-makes-24m-loss-under-shadow-of-print-advertising-and-phone-hacking?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Copy_to_clipboard

And then the PM declared the government would overturn the vote!Government will seek to overturn Lords vote on newspapers, says May

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2018/jan/11/government-overturn-lords-vote-newspapers-may?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Copy_to_clipboard

POLITICAL INFLUENCE MPs slam incessant inaccuracies

Remember that Clause One of the Editors Code concerns accuracy, a rather basic requirement of news media, and a legal requirement for broadcast media (but not the self-regulated press of course).

The unsubtle, untrammeled flak (Chomsky filter...) that has seen MPs labelled traitors over Brexit votes carries a strong whiff of fascism. Death threats were received by those government MPs who dared defy government policy, which of course closely mirrors the editorial policy of the right-wing press, especially the Mail - which historically supported fascism, including Britain's own wannabe Hitler, Oswald Mosley.

The short quote of one Tory MP would be a useful one to learn ("newspapers that seem entirely disinhibited in the inaccuracies they peddle“):
"Some of this was fuelled and orchestrated by newspapers that seem entirely disinhibited in the inaccuracies they peddle and the vitriolic abuse they are prepared to heap on those who do ­anything they consider to be at variance with their version of what Brexit should be. This both obscures the real issues, and encourages an atmosphere of ­crisis and confrontation between binary ­positions that leads directly to the death threats that we have received.”

Anna Soubry, another rebel, said such reports fostered a climate of extremism. “That’s the thing that concerns me about all of this. We’re increasingly having a form of politics in which debate is not based on ideas. It’s based on complete and total misconceptions. It’s whipping up a storm by newspapers. It’s poisoning public life.”

Tory rebels urge Theresa May to form cross-party alliance for soft Brexit https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/dec/17/tory-rebels-urge-theresa-may-to-form-cross-party-alliance-for-soft-brexit?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Blogger

TWITTER troll twerp jailed

Jail. Maybe that's what press self-regulation needs as a sanction to work?! Would Jan Moir have written that nasty, virulently homophobic Hate Mail column on the just deceased Stephen Gateley if the press faced sanctions like these tweeting twonks?

Guardian: Teenager jailed for trolling footballer Andy Woodward about abuse.

SOCIAL MEDIA MPs consider law to make Facebook etc liable in abuse cases

Again, newspaper owners are campaigning for the likes of Facebook (which profits from their content while passing back minimal revenue; is sucking vital ad revenue away from them; changes their newsfeed algorithms periodically, often losing newspapers large proportions of online readers as a result with no means for them to protest or influence this)
Guardian: Make Facebook liable for content, says report on UK election intimidation.

Theresa May should consider the introduction of two new laws to deter the intimidation of MPs during elections and force social media firms to monitor illegal content, an influential committee has said.

The independent Committee on Standards in Public Life, which advises the prime minister on ethics, has called for the introduction within a year of a new specific offence in electoral law to halt widespread abuse when voters go to the polls.
The watchdog will recommend another law to shift the liability for illegal content on to social media firms such as Facebook and Google, a legal change which will be easier once Britain leaves the European Union.
Both changes form part of the hard-hitting conclusions of an inquiry into intimidation experienced by parliamentary candidates in this year’s election campaign.
Other recommendations include:

• Social media firms should make decisions quickly to take down intimidatory content.

• Political parties should, by December 2018, draw up a joint code of conduct on intimidatory behaviour during election campaigns.
  
• The National Police Chiefs’ Council should ensure that police are trained to investigate offences committed through social media.
  
• Ministers should bring forward rules so that council candidates will no longer be required to release their home addresses.

OWNERSHIP Billionaire Kochs gain Time mouthpiece?

Moderately long article which looks not just at the Kochs' part in the buyout of Time magazine, but a wider picture of right-wing, conservative billionaires gaining influence by being allowed to buy up ever more of the US media, even where it means creating monopoly.

Of course, this was one of Chomsky's propaganda model's five filters, concentration of ownership, and is an historic trend explored in Curran and Seaton's classic study of press history, Power Without Responsibility.

‘Their own media megaphone’: what do the Koch brothers want from Time? https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/nov/27/koch-brothers-time-magazine-media-power?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Blogger

CHOMSKY ADVERTISER FILTER Stop Funding Hate D Mail campaign

FEB 2018 UPDATE: The campaign continues to have traction, an interesting reversal of the history of left-wing papers struggling to gain advertising. Not that we can say the Mail is struggling yet, other than with the general disruption of digitisation, with the online migration of advertising.
The campaign got multiple replies from advertisers pledging to cease placing ads in the Mail after tweeting about a Richard Littlejohn column condemning two gay dads, including celebrity swimmer Tom Daley.

Guardian: Center Parcs pulls Daily Mail ads after column against same-sex parents.

SFH aims to reduce what it sees as the baleful, malevolent influence over UK democracy (such as it is) and public opinion by pressuring advertisers with potential boycotts.

Peter Preston here recalls how left-wing reportage was discouraged through government encouraging advertisers to withdraw from newspapers that were critical of government 'defence' (ie, war!) policy, specifically the Suez crisis.

He develops a valid point - though once more here we can see the potential for social media and we media to have a greater impact on the poor practices of the press industry than the self-reliant IPSO.

Guardian: Bullying Paperchase and the Mail’s other advertisers just hurts everyone.

MURDOCH made deal with Prime Minister?

The machinations of Murdoch are widely assumed to include deals with sitting and wannabe PMs, but proving this is notoriously difficult. It's hardly in the interests of either to admit to this.

The pattern of incredible access to government, PM and ministers, of Murdoch and his minions under the Tory government was eventually revealed through journalistic investigation and Freedom of Information Act requests that were very reluctantly acceded to by that same government.

Now we have one former minister detailing how the News International chief Rebecca Brooks bluntly told him she was running government policy in partnership with PM Cameron, with the appointment of (later jailed) Murdoch man David Coulson as Press Secretary part of the deal.

A note of caution though: this is as filtered through the notionally centre-left Guardian (many of whose readers firmly disagree with that description so set up an alternative, actually left-wing Guardian online!)

Ken Clarke: Tories had deal with Rupert Murdoch for 2010 election https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/nov/23/ken-clarke-cameron-had-deal-with-murdoch-for-2010-election?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Blogger

OFCOM censure Fox News - compare to IPSO...

Who'd have thought it ... the fabled 'fair and balanced' Fox News, Murdoch's right-wing agit-prop broadcast mouthpiece, responsible for making Americans doubt the nationality of their own president (Obama), has finally been found guilty of breaching UK impartiality laws for TV news.

That this comes after it's been withdrawn from UK broadcasts, so no longer has a license to defend, renders OfCom's ruling symbolic ... except that it could (should?) impact the Murdoch bid to buy up the 61% of BSkyB shares his corporation doesn't own, currently the subject of government scrutiny. Markets sent 21st Century Fox (the conglomerate for the film and broadcast holdings, with the troublesome but politically important print empire hived off into a separate, less profitable entity) shares down, reflecting worries that this boosts the prospect (unlikely?!) of the friendly Tory government blocking the bid.

It is highly instructive to draw a comparison with the press regulators. The PCC allowed great leeway under the banner of comment, for example in the Jan Moir column over Stephen Gateley's death, and IPSO continues this stance. OfCom explicitly conclude that commentary, opinion pieces, do not create an exception to the requirement of basic levels of balance, quite a contrasting stance.

Fox News shows broke UK TV impartiality rules, Ofcom finds https://www.theguardian.com/media/2017/nov/06/fox-news-shows-broke-uk-tv-impartiality-rules-ofcom-finds?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Blogger

OMBUDSMAN Guardian's self-regulation outside IPSO

'Why should newspapers not be accountable?' https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/oct/22/why-should-newspapers-not-be-accountable?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Blogger

FUTURE WEB 2.0 Facebook Google to be declared publishers?

The newspaper industry have been campaigning for this for some time - but I wouldn't hold your breath; Facebook alone has 1 of the biggest lobbying teams/spend of any global corporation (and boosted it significantly as soon as the Capita/election influence scandal hit hard in March/April 2018).

Guardian: Ofcom chair raises prospect of regulation for Google and Facebook.

UPDATE: The Culture Minister - in the same week he fiercely opposed Leveson2 and tougher press regulation (but actually seems to have proposed statutory regulation by the back door...), he's announced plans for new legislation to regulate social media, including a levy to pay for more monitoring.

UK government plans new legislation to tame internet's 'wild west'

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/may/19/uk-government-plans-new-laws-tackle-internet-wild-west?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Copy_to_clipboard