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Sunday’s Sun will be more of the same
Tim Gopsill Editor Free Press
DATELINE: 18/2/12
Rupert Murdoch appears to have rallied his disgruntled troops without too much trouble with his announcement today of the imminent Sun on Sunday.
"We will build on the Sun's proud heritage by launching the Sun on Sunday very soon," he said, and commentators are taking off their hats to him. Such "chutzpah", to quote the BBC's Torin Douglas.
For News International staff, a benign word from on high seems to have made them forget the closure of the News of the World, the police round-ups and the supposed betrayal of their precious sources by their bosses.Others might be less excited. Michael Woolf, Rupert Murdoch's acerbic American biographer, says it is all just "spin": it will be impossible to launch the paper, he said on Channel 4 News, if there are more bribery arrests and parent company News Corporation's US lawyers worry that it might increase the likelihood of a prosecution under the dreaded Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.
But assuming it is launched, the new paper – they can't call it the Sunday Sun because there is already one of that name, published in Newcastle-on-Tyne – will do more than "build on a proud heritage". It will reconstruct a newspaper conglomerate that restores to its owner an unacceptable degree of leverage on the industry and on the conduct of public life in Britain.
The News of the World closure fitted in with an existing long-term management plan to replace it with a Sunday version of the Sun. They would share staff and, important for marketing, their website. This is what has happened at other seven-day national groups.
Before that closure News International sat on 35 per cent of the national paper market. If the Sunday can sell 2 million they'll be back at the same level.
It will perforce have new faces in management and editorship, with most of the old ones en route for the criminal courts; it won't be able to spend so lavishly on bent coppers or ex-coppers and it will have to be careful about its newsgathering methods for a bit.
But it will still be a Murdoch tabloid. It will pour bile and abuse on innocent people - migrants, claimants, trade unionists and public service workers. It will fulminate at Europe and foreigners in general. It will bang a deafening chauvinistic drum on sport. It will carry cheesecake girlie photos with cringeworthy captions and page after page of senseless gossip on desperately misbehaving celebrities.
In short, it will prove the main points that the CPBF and other campaigners have been making for the last year: that companies controlling so much of the media must be subjected to regulatory scrutiny.
There was a widespread view that New Corporation should be checked as a "fit and proper" owner of BSkyB while its bid to buy up the satellite TV group was going through a year ago. The regulators couldn't even consider whether the takeover would have given News Corp excessive power over the market, since the European Commission had already nodded it through.
It was all thoroughly inadequate. The bid's sudden failure was nothing to do the regulators – the people whose job is supposed to be to ensure that broadcast media are in the right hands. That was down to campaigners, helped by the revelations in the Guardian.
The "fit and proper person" test can be applied by competition regulators to some takeover bids. But a Sun on Sunday launch wouldn't be a takeover, so under present rules there is no means of applying any such test to News International.
But the reforms to be considered by the Leveson Inquiry - in its final stage in 2013/14 – will include the granting of powers to apply such a "public interest" test to big media at any appropriate time.
This is one of the calls in the submission to Leveson from the Co-ordinating Committee for Media Reform (CCMR), which is backed by the CPBF; indeed the section on the application of public interest considerations to media ownership was written and presented to the influential Oxford Media Convention in January by CPBF national council member Jonathan Hardy.
One threshold that would trigger a test is when companies control more than 15 per cent of any market; 30 per cent would be the absolute limit, above which titles would have to be divested to other owners or independent editorial control.
The Sun on Sunday would certainly push the Murdochs' share of UK national titles past that limit. The conduct of their journalists is more than likely to help make the case for such rules to be established; under which the new paper could even be forcibly removed from the ownership of the Murdoch group!
Last modified: Tuesday, February 21, 2012
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Previous media ownership stories
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Submission on Media Pluralism to Ofcom
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Notices
Events & Announcements
World Press Freedom Day
More reporters are currently imprisoned in Turkey than in any other country in the world. Only a matter of weeks ago lawyers failed to persuade a Turkish court to release a 76-year-old journalist from a Turkish internet news station.
World Press Freedom Day on Friday May 3, 2013 is being marked in Britain by a rally to highlight the dangers facing journalists in Turkey and in this podcast, Nicholas Jones speaks to Barry White, Organiser at the Campaign for Press and Broadcasting Freedom, and Sam Bamford, the TUC's policy officer for Eastern Europe and Africa about the importance of a campaign to highlight international press freedom.
The World Press Freedom Day rally is being staged by the National Union of Journalists at the NUJ head office, Gray’s Inn Road, London WC1 on Thursday May 2, 6pm-8pm.
DATELINE: 27/4/13
UK launch of EU media campaign
DATELINE: 13/3/13
The UK launch of a 'European Citizens' Initiative' calling for EU rules against concentration of media power will take place on Thursday March 21 from 11:00am – 12:30pm in Committee Room 4A at the House of Lords, London. Guest speakers will include actor and activist Hugh Grant (pictured), media consultant Claire Enders, Professor Steven Barnett, Barry McCall (President of the NUJ) and Marc Gruber (Director of the European Federation of Journalists).
A European Citizens' Initiative is an official petition, like a Downing Street petition. If it succeeds in gathering a million signatures across the EU, the Commission is obliged to respond.
This petition calls for the EU to act to protect media pluralism and press freedom.
CPBF Annual General Meeting
DATELINE: 1/3/13
Make a note in your diary
Saturday 13 July 2013 from 10.00am
NUJ HQ, 308/312 Gray's Inn Road, London WC1.
Leveson, media ownership, CPBF future work.
DOWNLOAD FREEPRESS NOW
DATELINE: 26/3/10
Download Freepress in PDF, ePub or mobi format. Issue 194 now available.
MEDIA FOR ALL CONFERENCE
DATELINE: 26/3/10
Papers from the Media for All Conference
MEDIA MANIFESTO
DATELINE: 26/3/10
The media’s job is to inform and entertain us but we rely on them too to tell us what our rulers and representatives are up to. In the run-up to the Iraq war the government used spin and disinformation in the media to create panic and mislead people. The truth is coming out now, but we need stronger, more independent media to be able to scrutinise governments and make informed choices.
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Previous stories
Media Ownership
Rupert Murdoch to launch Sun on Sunday newspaper 'soon'
Northcliffe to axe two Kent weeklies in wake of failed deal
A Chance for Change
Submission on Media Pluralism to Ofcom
News Corp subsidiary probed in Australia
James Murdoch resigns from Sun and Times boards
Ofcom media plurality review gets more than 45,000 submissions
Why I believe it's all over for James Murdoch
Campaign grows to oust Murdoch
Phone-hacking: building the campaign for change
Parliament debates media ownership
News International to sell Wapping site
Wapping and the Miners' strike - making the connections
Down the Lane
Brooks goes down in flames
Lord Justice Leveson's inquiry: A chance at last to expose hidden collusion
Murdoch blinks
Really the End of the World?
News Corp's BSkyB bid referred to regulator
News of the World to close amid hacking scandal
Backlash for Jeremy Hunt over BSkyB deal
News Corporation moves closer to a takeover of BSkyB – demo outside DCMS today 12 noon to 2 pm
Takeover of BSkyB 'just the begining'
Taking action against the Murdoch takeover
BSkyB takeover delayed
BSkyB takeover delayed
Williams on 'Outfoxed'
Hunt to give final verdict on News Corp's BSkyB bid on 26 April
What the Sky decision tells us about media reform
BSkyB takeover - what the papers said
