Cross Media Ownership – What The Papers Say
Newspaper leader columns predictably differed this morning in their opinion of the Green Paper on cross media ownership issued yesterday. What follows is a summary of the leader columns of the Times, The Guardian, The Independent and The Financial Times.
The Times (News Corporation) – “Stephen Dorrell’s proposals on media ownership display every sign of the muddle, weakness and defeatism that are this Conservative government’s best known trademarks. The long awaited paper was a triumph of lobbyists from TV and newspaper groups which want to buy and sell one another; it is a triumph for the short term fixers within the Tory party who think that paternalism and the free market can be cooked up to produce the instant benefits of both….”
….”Mr Dorrell’s proposal is that existing media portfolios, none of them even close to a monopoly and many of them built up from nothing or from one time loss-making failures, should be put up for the regulator’s judgement. There is no basis in business philosophy for this….”
….”It is hard to believe that, had Dorrell’s laws been in force, there would have been the incentive to risk so much for The Times. Nor would there have been the incentive to build the BSkyB satellite broadcasting system if its size was to be limited to 20% of its market and its existence put under the control of competitors who can effect every participant’s market share by their own price rises or poor performance.”
The Guardian (Guardian Media Group Plc) – “Any government policy welcomed by practically everyone except Rupert Murdoch will be taken by many people in the media village as a double endorsement. But life is not that simple. Yesterday’s review of media ownership – a rare example of long-term strategy by the government – has upset Mr Murdoch precisely because one of its objectives is to prevent his empire from expanding much beyond its present market share of around 10%. He’s big enough already. Yet, ironically, News International is just the sort of global media company that the government would like to see more of….”
….”A danger is that a partial relaxation of this kind won’t be big enough to produce companies with the critical mass to take on the Time-Warners of this world. All it is really doing is bestowing on the newspaper companies the business freedom they have been clamouring for.”
The Independent (Mirror Group) – “Mr Dorrell has managed to cut out just two players – Rupert Murdoch, though his present privileged position remains untouched, and Mirror Group, which appears to have been caught in the crossfire….”
….”It is far from clear what Mr Dorrell is trying to achieve with these interim proposals. Yes, there will be scope for TV companies to buy newspaper groups. But with the exception of the Express papers, are any national newspapers for sale? And, if they are, does anybody really want to buy them in this difficult market? No doubt by chance rather than design, the two groups most adversely affected are the Mirror Group, publisher of the Labour-leaning Mirror, and MAI, chaired by Labour peer Lord Hollick. Conspiracy theorists will believe otherwise. The Government’s proposals for the longer term have more merit. The Green Paper promises to limit any one player to 10% of the national market and 20% of regional markets. The chances of this being enacted before the next election look pretty remote, however.”
Financial Times (Pearson Plc) – “These longer term proposals are troubling in some respects, partly because measures of overall market shares are unavoidably arbitrary, but also because of the envisaged role of the regulator. It would seem better to impose clear rules than allow intrinsically political judgements by an official. The short term suggestions are, by contrast, reasonable compromises between commercial pressures and diversity of ownership. Yet they also leave questions unaddressed – above all, what is to be done about existing concentration of ownership.”