Rupert Murdoch. Image: Flickr/ Surian Soosay
After the Election, renewal of the BBC charter will be a major policy issue, but so too will tackling media plurality. How these are brought together will influence the outcome for both. Since 2011 a recurring concern in the media plurality policy debate has been the place of the BBC and, as ever, this one comes pre-loaded with commercial and political interests.
Media plurality itself re-emerged as a pre-eminent policy concern due to chronic conditions and acute symptoms. The chronic conditions are on-going media convergence, the persistence of high levels of media concentration across news media, and the emergence of monopolistic digital giants. The acute symptoms were the proposed takeover of BSkyB by News Corporation in 2010, a public interest test referral by Vince Cable, an Ofcom investigation, and the revelations of less than quasi-judicial dealings between Government and Murdoch, phone-hacking and Leveson.
