Murdoch’s Sky bid growing increasingly toxic

For the first time there are realistic chances that the £11.7bn Murdoch bid for all of Sky will not go ahead – or at the very least be mired in further delays amid intensifying political controversy

Having already raised concern about media plurality issues, communications regular Ofcom will later this month take one of its most important decisions: whether Rupert Murdoch and his Fox and family management team are still fit and proper people to own all of Sky in light of new evidence surrounding Fox coverage of the murder of Democratic worker Seth Rich.

Ofcom has of course already found that the deal should be cleared on “fit and proper person” grounds. There was judged to be sufficient distance between the illegal phone-hacking at the News of the World and the management and performance of Sky News since its inception. The fact that there has never been evidence of Murdoch’s political interference in the output of the 24-hour news channel enabled Ofcom to take such a decision. Fox and Sky were completely different animals, not just in editorial approach but also in how women employees were treated.

Besides, Murdoch’s 39 per cent of Sky has always given him effective control anyway, and despite the campaigns of the professional Murdoch haters there was little chance in the real world that a merger would lead to the perfectly respectable values of Sky News being suborned by the raucous fellows from Fox. Or so the argument has gone until now.

All such decisions are matters of balance and judgement and on the facts available at the time Ofcom made a fit and proper decision.

But when the facts change…

Just as the hacking of the mobile phone of murdered schoolgirl Milly Dowler turned out to be toxic for the News of the World, so the Fox reporting of the death of Seth Rich could, when the full facts are known, become toxic for the Sky deal.

The short version of a long and complex story is that after Seth Rich was murdered in an apparent bungled robbery, florid conspiracy theories began to fly that the death may have been connected to the Democratic Party’s leaked email scandal with the false implication that it might have been Rich rather than a Russian hack that was responsible for the leaks.

Naturally in right-wing conspiracy land Rich was murdered as part of the Democratic cover-up.

Equally obviously, Fox News, a number of Fox anchors and commentators, President Trump, and who knows, maybe even Rupert Murdoch himself, got excited about a story that would have greatly relieved the pressure on Trump over “the Russian connection.”

Fox ran a story citing a Federal source who claimed the FBI examined Rich’s computer and found emails from Wikileaks.

The FBI has denied this is true and the only named source in the Fox piece, a regular Fox contributor, Rod Wheeler, alleges in a lawsuit made-up quotes were attributed to him, something that Fox sees no evidence for.

The news network took the story down after review because, it said, the article did not meet its standards pending a full investigation although some associated with Fox continued to Tweet contentiously about the issue.

What does any of this matter in the context of a multi-billion business deal?

It makes the issues of ethics and common decency both more central and more current. This is not about malpractice in a now defunct newspaper seven years ago, but it’s about television news and it happened last year and another family is distraught and angry that the pursuit of the real killer of their son has at the very least been overshadowed if not actually disrupted.

Ironically the incident happened just after new compliance rules had been introduced at Fox News.

There is also the matter of outrageous political bias and the allegation that Fox showed the story to the Trump White House and received the President’s enthusiastic blessing before publication.

News executives at Sky would neither contemplate nor ever do such a thing, but the element of taint by association is growing, in particular because corporate Fox has trumpeted that the full coming together of Fox and Sky would create a “global powerhouse.”

Ofcom is now in a difficult position. It has to respond to the implications of the Seth Rich row by 25 August and it will be impossible to know by then the full outcome of either the law suit or the promised Fox News internal investigation.

In response to the concerns of the senior cross-party MPs who wrote to Ofcom expressing their concern, and indeed Culture Secretary Karen Bradley’s request to consider the new developments, Ofcom has to take into account the new information which surely tips the balance in favour of a proper investigation as much because of matters of timing as any other.

While the full details of the case cannot be known at this stage there is enough to suggest that a serious issue needs to be looked at and that Rupert Murdoch should not get the benefit of the doubt this time. Abuses, however different, are by their very nature cumulative.

As Culture Secretary Bradley says she is already minded to refer the proposed takeover to the Competition and Markets Authority on plurality grounds it will be an easy matter, and the right decision, to have the CMA also look at the ethical issues that are now inevitably associated with the Fox takeover.

When the facts change, as many have argued over the years, then the response to them must surely change too.

This will inevitably increase the scale of a CMA investigation and the time it will take. These are matters that should not be rushed and if that means further delay and Murdoch investors start to lose the appetite for the deal then so be it.

In many ways this would be unfortunate because the “global powerhouse” would still be modest in size compared with Amazon, Google or Facebook – and the social media giants desperately need competition.

If this happens Rupert Murdoch will only have himself to blame for ignoring or acquiescing in a culture at Fox News that UK regulators could well find unacceptable.