Ofcom: The Office of Screwing Over Murdoch? There are several winners in the wake of News Corp's collapsed BSkyB takeover, but the most unlikely is one we’ve all overlooked. It might surprise you, too. In 2009 David Cameron promised a “bonfire of the quangos” if the Conservatives took power. He singled out one quango in particular: Ofcom. The uber-regulator was created …
There are many good reasons to criticise Ofcom, but 'having their own branded water' isn't one of them. It's not expensive to get some frosted bottles with resealable caps and your logo on the side that can be refilled from the tap (or using a 'Sodastream' if you prefer fizzy) and used to impress guests.
...........I have a question to pose. Are you suggesting that News Corp should have been allowed to take over BSkyB completely? Is there not another explanation for Ofcom's apparent change of style? For most of the Blair/Brown years the then government was terrified of Murdoch (not entirely difficult to understand given what NI's newspapers did to Labour throughout the eighties and early nineties until it dawned on Murdoch that the Tories had reached the point of unelectability) and would have done everything they could to stymie any moves by Ofcom to move against NI for any reason. The then opposition Tories would most certainly have not supported any moves against Murdoch's company because they very badly wanted Murdoch back onside. Once Ofcom knew that they could tackle Murdoch without political interference (because by this time NI was about as popular with the voters as syphilis and the new Tory government did not dare hinder Ofcom) they did - and about time too.
Yes, there was no rational basis to refer the takeover on competition and plurality grounds. To block the merger on these grounds, Ofcom had to bend the rules. This is what it did.
As for "suitability", YMMV. But that's a separate argument.
Hunt referred the bid to the CoCo after BSkyB withdrew the undertakings, it had basically changed its mind about the takeover by then.
The rest of your post is interesting but speculative.
Ofcom has been singularly poor at promoting competition in the industries it regulates. Ownership of BSkyB is of less interest than the failure to break up the rights monopoly on, say, Premier League matches after the collapse of Setanta.
"News Corp’s products do not dominate any significant market, even where they’re an important player. Virgin Media competes in Pay TV and broadband bundles, and The Telegraph competes in upmarket newspapers, for example."
Sorry, but the shear naivety shown in this post is staggering. VM competes? Sorry, it competes in the few areas you can get it. It doesn't even run cable to large sections of London. I can, however, get BSkyB pretty much anywhere. Sky has over 10m subscribers, VM has 3.4m. That's dominate in paytv else they wouldn't have had to wholesale anything. Add their little soiree with ITV part ownership to prevent takeover and you can see some Microsoft behaviour creeping in.
Doesn't dominate the press? How do you define dominating? In 2011 the News of The World and the Sunday Times had 38.5% of the market (nearest rival 19.75%). In the same year The Sun and The Times held 32% of the daily market if the Evening Standard is included, and 34% if it is not (nearest rival 21%). The figures will be worse if the Scottish press are excluded, I'd call that a dominating influence in the Sunday press for sure.
In short, cry me a f*cking river. The man and his corporations are nothing but parasites in my opinion and he has thoroughly earned any shitty treatment he gets. Notice how he's desperate to get away from any claims regarding influencing politicians - principally due to the US laws regarding the corruption of Government officials I'd dare say.
Your numbers don't add up. The domination is imaginary, and tiny compared to established networks (US) and the BBC (UK).
What you're saying is:
"I really, really hate Murdoch, and I don't think he should be allowed to do business where I live."
Which is fine. But don't throw your toys out of the pram when people point out you're being irrational and medieval.
As for politicians: did Gordon Brown *really* have to invite the Murdochs to his daughter's funeral? Did Cameron *really* have to employ Andy Coulson?
The Milly Dowler revelations did not "turn out to be false". One aspect of the original Gruaniad story was wrong: that Murdoch's hacks deleted messages from the dead girl's phone to make way for more incoming messages. It later emerged these messages had expired automatically from her voicemail.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/oct/21/phone-hacking-dowlers
The fundamental facts of the story are correct. The News of the Screws DID hack into the dead girl's phone and listen to her voicemail. News International (proprietor R. Murdoch) paid £2m+ compensation to the girl's family and the Dirty Digger himself made a personal donation of £1m to charity. This would not have happened if the Milly Dowler revelations were as false as the line Orlowski is trying to spin.
In addition News International has not disputed that the News of the Screws hacked Milly Dowler's phone. Which they would have done if the story was untrue. ISTR the latest, proper police investigation into phone hacking confirmed that the News of the Screws had hacked Milly Dowler's phone.
The News of the Screws also interfered with the police investigation into Milly Dowler's abduction and murder. They left fake voicemail messages suggesting the dead girl was trying to find work via an employment agency. (IIRC the phone number on left on those voicemail messages was actually a contact for a Murdoch hack.) This resulted in police chasing up bogus leads in the wrong part of the country.
The Guardian story insinuated that NoW staff deleted voicemails giving the Dowler parents the false hope that their daughter was alive.
This caused huge public revulsion, leading to the NoW closure and Leveson. It was wrong: NoW staff did not delete emails. Voicemails were removed by the system as they were replaced by newer voicemails on a FIFO basis.
Your bias is preventing you from acknowledging this.
I never heard about the emails -- I only heard about the voicemails. The email claims could not possibly have caused me to be any more revulsed than I already was. I doubt many people would say any different. They couldn't have gotten any lower unless they'd started beating people up to get stories!
Your voicemail works differently than mine.
Once I listen to a message, it has a finite lifespan, unless I mark it to be saved. If I don't mark it to be saved, when my mailbox fills up, it stops accepting new messages until 1) messages are deleted manually or 2) messages are deleted due to age.
Except this isn't the case of the Jesuit priest producing the dog when accused of murdering a man and his dog. The case as I recall reading it and the comments at the time is that what News Corp did CAUSED hope for the victim's family because they thought she was updating things in the phone.
What I see here on these pages from my perch across the sea is that Old Blighty is infested with an irrational hatred of Rupert Murdoch and anything with which he is associated, and any excuse to continue to slander or libel him is welcome. Perhaps because too often you Brits seem to stifle legitimate criticism in the name of preventing slander and libel.
"This caused huge public revulsion" - No; the huge public revulsion was caused by the listening, not the deleting. The deleting was a detail. For the previous known victims, NotW had some kind of public interest justification, or else they were people like royalty who had courted media attention or were otherwise able to look after themselves. None of that applied to the Dowlers. They were innocent. There was no justification for reading their dead daughter's email. The public cared about them in a way they didn't care about celebrities and politicians.
Your article is wrong on this point, and from your 10:31 comment it seems you still don't understand why what the NotW did was a big deal.
Secondly El Reg commentards have a duty to avoid [using the] emotive word hacking [to describe] the trivial task of accessing voicemail.
Nicely put, sir. At last, a bit of sense. I'd go a little further and say that hacking should not have the negative connotations that The Media[TM] attach to it within this community but your admonition will do nicely.
To pretend this opinion piece is an objective journalistic analysis is a bit rich, here are just two emotive misrepresentations I'd like to highlight.
The Milly Dowler accusation wasn't false, it contained inaccuracies. The News of the World did use the fact that Millie Dowler hadn't changed her pin to listen to her voice mails. That is accepted and illegal. They didn't delete her voice mails which was part of but not the whole claim. Personally I'm still disgusted by that behaviour.
OFCom are not Sir Humphreys (Civil Servants responsible to ministers). They are a QUANGO (QA stands for Quasi Autonomous) which means they are not servants of the Government. They are set up to be independant of ministers to avoid exactly what some people think might have happened, that the decision was rubber stamped by a ministerial team enamoured of Mr Murdoch. You might be right, although I disagree, OFCom had overstressed the plurality point; but to present their designed independance as disobedience is simply incorrect.
"They didn't delete her voice mails which was part of but not the whole claim. Personally I'm still disgusted by that behaviour."
In my case, if my voicemail fills up with unlistened to messages, then it won't accept any more. The act of the NotW, by illegally accessing the voicemails caused them to be marked read which led to the messages being deleted, even if that was not the intended outcome, which resulted in the false hopes that she was alive and had accessed them.
.. Ofcom's doing an fantastic job! Your man's clearly worth his £400K.
Isn't the entire point of a regulator that is should stop dodgy politicians putting big business' interests ahead of their constinuents' interests? If only the other regulators would get their noses out of big business' butt and start doing their jobs so effectively.
Rock on Ofcom!
"On 5 July the Milly Dowler story broke, causing universal revulsion. And while it turned out to be false"
The 'story' was not false insofar as the hacking allegations were concerned - the accusation of directly deleting the voice messages was. IIRC the phone provider automatically deleted messages 72 hours after being listened to, and the particular emptying of the message queue, leading to the 'false hope', was likely due to a private investigator for the Dowlers listening to them. What seemed fairly certain was that they were not maliciously deleted by the NotW or it's agent in order to make room for more messages - something that was being alleged.
At the time it was still unclear whether this accounted for all message deletions, the suspicion being that some may have been deleted by the agent for the NotW inadvertently 'starting the timer' - highly likely given that the PI and NotW admissions of listening to some messages.
@Tim:
A story claiming that elephants can fly does not become true (or 'not false') because the story also happens to (correctly) point out that elephants have trunks.
"What seemed fairly certain was that they were not maliciously deleted by the NotW or it's agent in order to make room for more messages - something that was being alleged."
Yes.
"A story claiming that elephants can fly does not become true (or 'not false') because the story also happens to (correctly) point out that elephants have trunks"
You refer to "the Milly Dowler story" - without qualifications as to what part of the whole story relating to her. Parts of "the Milly Dowler story" were almost certainly false (the deliberate deletion), many parts were true. That does not make "the Milly Dowler story" false, as you claim, only elements of it.
I did not claim "the Milly Dowler story" (as a entity) was true - you claimed it was false.
"A story claiming that elephants can fly does not become true (or 'not false') because the story also happens to (correctly) point out that elephants have trunks."
In this case a better analogy would be a story about elephants having trunks making the false assertion that elephants can fly. That does not negate the main thrust of the story which is that elephants have trunks.
And the Guardian sub headline on that story?
EXCLUSIVE: Paper deleted missing schoolgirl's voicemails, giving family false hope
Followed by:
Milly Dowler's mother tells Clegg deleted messages gave her hope (BBC)
She's picked up her voicemails. She's alive!' Murdered Milly's mother tells Leveson Inquiry of the moment phone hackers gave her false hope (Mail)
etc
Speaking of elephants in the room...
While the NI hackers did not directly delete the voicemails on Milly Dowler's phone, their actions did cause the voicemails to be deleted thereby giving Milly Dowler parent's false hope she was alive.
It's a bit like a dunk in a car knocking somebody down and killing them, then saying "Oh! I didn't mean to kill anyone while driving while drunk"
They’re still culpable.
"and their cross-media ownership gives them unrivaled opportunities to promote their products."
Unlike the BBC, then?
The big difference being, that if you don't pay your Sky bill, you could get cut off. if you don't pay the license fee, you could get locked up.
Only one organisation dominates the UK media market - the BBC.
However, RE: "You also wonder why, if Ofcom did not think BSkyB wasn't fit and proper to run a media company, it didn't say so from the start?"
I don't think Ofcom's query was (or is) whether BskyB is fit and proper to run a media company, more whether the Murdochs were fit and proper to own 100% of a media company. Remember, at the moment, they own 39% of Sky. Ofcom know this, and they know that in theory, the other shareholders can act to prevent the Murdochs taking too much control.
This is, however, an interesting article. I find it interesting you pointed out that the perception was (and is) that the Murdochs own Sky, while not actually owning it.
I think this is related to something the Murdochs do quite well. They are good at appearing to have more than they do. Think about it. Their news papers sell to probably (at most) 10% of the country. Sky despite having a lot of subscribers to it's satellite platform, actually doesn't get a lot of viewers for any of it's channels. I'd even go so far as to say that the average episode of Coronation Street is watched by probably as many (if not more) people as those that read or watch Murdoch media outlets, yet no one questions how much power the staff behind Coronation Street has over the general population
But, the Murdochs appear to have power. Why? I suspect it's a combination of things.
1) They seem to be extraordinarily good at becoming friends with the people who are in the right places (even if those people are not in power, they are often advisors to someone who is).
2) They are perceived by people to have a lot of power. This has, in the past, made Politicians scared of offending them. This is what gives them that power.
In addition to the sources you stated, I don't remember Murdoch admitting to interfering with any newspaper's editorial policy until yesterday: http://www.itv.com/news/2012-04-25/murdochs-testimony-to-the-leveson-inquiry/ when he "Admitted editorial interference in The Sun, but not other newspapers".
He still denies interfering with editorial policy at The Times. Well he would wouldn't he, but he still hires and fires the editors. And I guess more voters still read the Sun anyway.
The fact remains that old school politicians have never liked starting arguments with those who buy ink by the barrelload. It wouldn't help them win votes. Maybe its the fact that fewer papers are sold each year that has resulted in Murdoch giving evidence for his organisation's criminality now, which is more than Maxwell ever did for stealing his employees pensions.
The reason for their power, amongst other things, is the threat of having your private life sieved by a team of hacks and investigators. Any public figure with anything resembling a past (96%) would run a mile from being dragged through the scandal sheets.
This threat has since been confirmed in the ongoing enquiry.
We had that exact same product when I worked at RBS, it's actually bottled on site from what is basically Brita filtered water and the bottles are re-used. It was a sacking offence to take a bottle, as the whole point was to save money on the previously ridiculous bills for bought in bottled water.
There are many things wrong with Ofcom and the concept of Quangos as a whole, but choosing this case as an example of what's wrong is just being plain contrary (or a magnificent troll on your part).
The worst thing they did in this case was not objecting to NewsCorp's effective control of BSkyB at a much earlier stage (despite numerous complaints). And while they blocked the takeover they seem willing for the effective control to remain as status quo.
A story with 3 groups of self serving, empire building, sleazy, cheating scumbags is just too easy to project bias onto. Predictably Andrew picked 'big content' as the good guys and everything has to follow from that. He ALWAYS champions 'big content' blind to any nuance or confounding factors.
OFCOMs biggest failing is not their mad empire building, it's their abject failure to get off their arses and actually defend the public. The politicians have been busy bending over for Murdoch for political advantage we've not counted.
There are no good guys here. But we'll settle for bad guys getting the right result for all the wrong reasons. Seems to me this is as close to working as the whole system has ever worked. Without that separation of control between government and QUANGO, the bickering and delays, we'd now have the wrong result for all the wrong reasons. Politicians can at least be shuffled every few years, Murdoch is an untreatable cancer.
Having drunk from the fabled bottles in meetings at their offices, it certainly tastes more like tap water than anything else. The bottles do look cool though...
Anyway, Jonathan Bliss hits the nail on the head for me. They are deliberately an independent regulator, so the idea is that JH & crew won't be able to make them do what he wants. Whether or not this was the right decision, it does sound like Ofcom have ignored DCMS and acted independently.
As for capture by Sir Humphrey more generally, in the majority of cases it's not capture, but ministers realising that the things they promised in opposition are unworkable / impossible / illegal / downright stupid. That's not capture, that's the civil service doing their job.
If you want to see an interesting example of this, look into the detail of Vince Cable's comments on the graduate tax when he launched the new fee structure - once in government, and with access to government tax experts he realised that a graduate tax would be too easy to dodge and fiddle in practice, so he thought (rightly or wrongly) the new fee structure would be the next closest thing. Regardless of your views on paying for higher education, a hypothecated graduate tax cannot work within the confines of our tax and HE systems.
It introduced me to torrenting, I can remember the first thing I torrented*, and the second thing was Lost.
* Got the DVD as well.
But everything I torrented was originally on FTA TV be it BBC, ITV, C4 or other Freeview channels, then got taken over by a pay channel.
Yet I still lost interest in Lost half way through the penultimate series, still have it to watch.
Oh and I haven't bothered to watch F1 this year as I still haven't managed to get a Astra 1 LNB.
From the perspective of an outsider, it looks as though after years of signficantly influencing who would be in power in the UK, Murdoch has been emasculated. His media holdings will still have influence but to nowhere near the same degree.
Whatever the rights and wrongs of the actions of politicians and media in Britain, the fallout from the current governments actions will be that Murdoch will no longer be able to control who gets elected. And I doubt Prime Ministers will be calling him very often in future. Which in itself is a very good thing.
I'm conspiracy theorist enough to think that after over a decade in which the Tories were kept out of power by, among other things, Murdochs influence, Cameron may even have planned it this way.
From Camerons perspective having to stick with Ofcom in its current form isn't too much of a price to pay. Looks like Vince Cable was right, if as usual, a little to free with his mouth.
"the perception was (and is) that the Murdochs own Sky, while not actually owning it."
Careful.
Control does not require total ownership. If you play your cards right it doesn't even require majority ownership.
Do a bit of research. See who is and was on the board(s) of the companies of interest in this picture. See where else they (and their relatives, partners, etc) are directors.
Then try to convince anyone with a clue that ownership matters much, when you've already got control by other means.
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