More radical media proposals are needed in a new geopolitical landscape
Opinion
With a review of media merger laws under way, perhaps next on the list for the culture secretary could be the small issues of wider media ownership and proper compensation from the tech giants?
It will take months to access the impact of the Donald Trump election victory — backed by X owner Elon Musk — on the media, but some of the early signs are far from encouraging.
Soon-to-be-vice-president of the US, JD Vance, has already warned the EU that the US would pull out of Nato if it goes ahead with tighter rules on the company formerly known as Twitter.
The effects of such a threat are difficult to compute because of the obvious fact that Nato has absolutely nothing to do with the EU. But it is not difficult to see the potential direction of travel once Trump and Vance are in the White House — almost anything is possible.
As with matters of trade and support for Ukraine, so with the media: only a cross-European defence would make any sense and the UK will have to make common cause with the community.
Future-proofing merger laws
Away from the crashing geopolitical tectonic plates, the Department of Culture, Media and Sport was this week getting on with business as normal — at least for now.
It came close to being buried under the gigantic headlines but this week culture secretary Lisa Nandy produced perfectly sensible proposals for updating media merger laws.
The present laws are 22 years old, from an almost pre-digital age when the communications were still, to a large extent, dominated by holders of television and radio licences plus newspapers.
“Since the media mergers regime came into force more than 20 years ago, our laws haven’t kept pace with technology and evolving news consumption habits,” said Nandy in what amounts to a truism.
So the culture secretary is trying to future-proof the rules for an age when people increasingly get their news online.
The entirely laudable aim is to protect the availability of “accurate, high-quality news from a variety of sources”, upholding media freedom along the way.
As a result, mergers involving online news companies connected with the UK or the online arms of print publications, at present unrecognised by legislation, could be subject to public-interest tests.
Weekly news magazines such as The Economist and Prospect would also be included, according to the consultation, and would be aligned with rules on foreign state influence.
For example, Nandy’s predecessor, Lucy Frazer, was able to use existing rules to effectively block a takeover of The Daily Telegraph by an United Arab Emirates-backed consortium.
The proposed purchase of The Observer by online news operator Tortoise Media would in theory come under the scrutiny of the modernised media merger laws. But, if the deal goes ahead, this is unlikely to happen because of the time needed to pass legislation and the fact that the new rules will not have retrospective powers.
The Telegraph saga is nearing an end — but it has brought more questions
Need for radical proposals
So far, so good.
Except that Nandy’s modest legislative proposals serve to highlight possible loopholes and the absence of radical proposals to address wider issues of media ownership in the UK.
They are the sort of issues raised by former Observer editor Will Hutton, author of the renowned book on the misgovernance of Britain, The State We’re In, and This Time No Mistakes, published just before this year’s general election.
While his main thrust is encouraging ideas of fellowship, increased public investment and turning British startups into significant companies, Hutton is concerned about what he regards as “the degraded public square”.
The public square is where democratic ideas can be openly and honestly discussed. It is degraded in part, Hutton believes, because of increasingly bitter and unbalanced right-wing newspapers owned by non-dom proprietors.
What Hutton regards as the disaster of Brexit could never have happened without the anti-immigration coverage of the Daily Mail, aided and abetted by The Sun and The Daily Telegraph, he believes.
So it is time to insist that majority stakes in major British media outlets should be held by those living in the UK and paying taxes in the UK — something that does not apply to Rupert Murdoch, whose family interests control both The Sun and The Times, or Viscount Rothermere of the Daily Mail.
Minority stakes would be welcome, of course, but control should rest with those who have “skin in the game” rather than living in splendour in California or mansions in Monaco.
It would be tricky, but not impossible, to make such requirements retrospective.
Proper compensation
At the very least, wider ideas of media ownership and the current effect of the existing arrangements on society and democracy should be given some consideration by Nandy once her modest proposals to modernise media merger rules have been passed.
There is also the unresolved problem of the existing media being properly compensated by the tech giants of California and beyond for the expensively created original content they produce.
Despite agreements at the edges, it is still too much a case of media groups creating the content and having most of the advertising creamed off by the online multibillionaires.
The second coming of Trump may not be the ideal time to confront the issue, but a start has to be made somewhere and again it should be a joint European venture.
Hutton’s book has appeared in the centenary year of the speech by John Maynard Keynes that attacked laissez-faire economics and emphasised the need for great public investment.
The way to get the attention of Apple, Facebook and Google would be to set up — or, at the very least, threaten to set up — a public digital network to provide some element of competition to the technological oligarchies, Hutton believes.
Another idea for Nandy — and if such a task is too much for the UK alone, then a trip to Brussels might be the answer.
Raymond Snoddy is a media consultant, national newspaper columnist and former presenter of NewsWatch on BBC News. He writes for The Media Leader on Wednesdays — bookmark his column here.