Culture Secretary Karen Bradley in the House of Commons, explains she intends to refer 21st Century Fox's £11.7 billion bid for Sky to the competition regulator for further investigation, September 2017.Press Association image. All rights reserved.Who would want to be a media regulator? The whole idea of cross-media regulation is bedevilled by confusion. The 2002 Enterprise Act had built into it two separate definitions of “sufficient plurality” (the condition that needed to be protected to avoid a media merger being blocked): plurality of viewpoints in relation to newspapers, and plurality of ownership in relation to “media enterprises” (the legal definition of broadcasters).
Why was this? There was a simple explanation: newspapers regularly present viewpoints, but broadcasters are regulated in the UK, with providers of news and current affairs content required to observe “due impartiality” and “due accuracy”, under the terms of Ofcom’s Broadcasting Code. They are not allowed to express their own views, except in very narrow circumstances (so the BBC is allowed to defend its funding mechanism on its own channels). It follows that, legally, there could not be a plurality of viewpoints in broadcasting. What is required is a sufficiency of the number of owners: a definition seen as a surrogate for plurality where viewpoints as such are banned.
This muddle has been further confused by Ofcom, which has introduced into consideration a version of “viewpoints in broadcasting”: it argues that the absence of any definition of an appropriate news agenda means that a would-be purchaser of a media enterprise could be blocked for fear of their manipulating the agenda of a news service.
