Culture, Media and Sport Secretary Matt Hancock arriving in Downing Street, London, for the first Cabinet meeting following the reshuffle, January 9. Stefan Rousseau/Press Association. All rights reserved.The initial verdict of the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) on the Fox/Sky deal was delayed by a month, as it was snowed under with submissions arguing that the deal should be blocked, primarily on the grounds that Fox’s many problems in the US showed it was not genuinely committed to high standards in broadcasting.
The opportunity to flood the CMA with anti-Fox material was provided by Karen Bradley, then Secretary of State for Culture, Digital, Media and Sport (and recently switched to Northern Ireland). She over-rode the Ofcom conclusion that there was no need to refer the merger to the CMA on broadcasting quality grounds. If that was a gamble – designed to nail down firmly the issue of whether Fox (as controlled by the Murdoch Family Trust, or MFT) was fit and proper to own Sky News – it certainly worked. The CMA endorsed the Ofcom verdict, largely by working through the available material in the same way as Ofcom had done.
This was no surprise: it is very rare for one competition authority to squelch another, and the CMA has chosen to remain as close to Ofcom as possible in its approach to the issues. So it was also no surprise that it ruled against the merger on media plurality grounds, thereby backing up an Ofcom judgment that was deficient in all kinds of ways.
