Heartbreak and laughter are perhaps the most appropriate responses to any suggestion that the UK has a free press. But the ideal could come a step closer to reality, thanks to a new campaign to wrest the national news media from the grasp of Rupert Murdoch, Viscount Rothermere “and other tax-shy non-resident oligarchs”.
Our national news is predominantly owned by billionaires. The Sun, The Times, The Sunday Times, Talk TV and Talk Radio are all owned by Murdoch. Jonathan Harmsworth aka Viscount Rothermere owns the Daily Mail, The Mail on Sunday, The i and The Metro. The Telegraph and The Sunday Telegraph, as of this year, belong to Friede Springer.
This means that three people with radical right-wing views who don’t even live in Britain own 82% of the UK newspaper market.
The new campaign is named after the political proposal at its heart, a Media Sovereignty Act to be enacted by Parliament which would ban overseas billionaires from owning UK news organisations.
Green Party leader Zack Polanski has already very publicly thrown his weight behind the act and so far more than 25,000 people have signed a fast-growing petition demanding a parliamentary debate for the act. This debate will take place in the House of Commons if 100,000 people sign the petition by 18 September.
“I think we’re looking at the start of a media revolution that has been a long time coming,” says Donnachadh McCarthy, one of the campaign’s organisers. “We’ve been taken aback by the public anger at the billionaires distorting what our press writes about and how, and the determination to insist that something is done about it.”
That sense of a British public heartily sick of being misinformed and lied to is not just based on the number of signatures on a petition. A YouGov poll, commissioned by the campaign, showed majority support among followers of many different political parties for an end to billionaire ownership of the press.
“It’s very clear that the vast majority of the British public would cheer at a law that kicked the billionaire owners out of our newsrooms,” says McCarthy. “This is a golden opportunity for the new PM Andy Burnham to give the country the media that it wants and deserves.”
Heatwaves light the touchpaper
A series of searing heatwaves that have sparked wildfires on bone-dry land across Europe and caused thousands of excess deaths is adding impetus to the Media Sovereignty Act campaign.
The public are frightened and disturbed. Apart from a small band of die-hard deniers, people can see the accelerating climate crisis coming to their doorsteps. They know that this is not a ‘new normal’ but the beginning of the collapse of the 11,000-year-old ecological status quo which enabled human societies to flourish.
We watch with growing disbelief and rage as the national newspapers double down on their increasingly unhinged denial of the horrific reality unfolding in front of our eyes.
A deadly mirror world
At a time of such overwhelming danger, a genuinely independent news media – one that is not at the beck and call of astronomically wealthy non-dom owners – would be holding the feet of our political leaders to the climate fire. It would be demanding to know why no meaningful action has been taken to stop us soaring past the last ‘safe’ threshold of a global temperature rise of 1.5C above pre-industrial levels. It would be demanding immediate, meaningful action, together with a metaphorical rolling of heads.
Instead, the UK’s billionaire-owned media has jumped feet first into a deadly mirror world where net zero, the globally agreed project to cut the emissions heating the planet, is mocked and denigrated as an act of unilateral economic self-harm.
Former Energy Secretary Ed Miliband was subjected to a relentless campaign of vilification by the Sun, the Mail and the Telegraph for daring to suggest that we should stick to our internationally agreed net zero targets. His opposition to more drilling for planet-wrecking North Sea oil and gas had the national press demanding his sacking on a daily basis. Those demands failed, but they had an effect, putting UK politicians on notice that, if they take the climate crisis seriously, they will be pilloried.
Don’t believe your own eyes
In a crowded field, the Daily Mail has established itself as one of the most alarmingly influential billionaire-owned titles. As wildfires ripped through Britain, they blamed the carnage on attempts to slow the collapse of nature through rewilding, rather than blaming those who have failed to act on the climate emergency.
Their front-page strapline was beyond satire: ‘After 1017 fires already this year, eco-dogma is blamed for turning country into tinderbox’. The quotes that supported the article were mainly from owners of grouse moors. It’s this skewed journalistic lens that makes it harder and harder to see these publications as anything other than billionaire megaphones.
The Daily Telegraph offers stiff competition to the Mail. In a recent opinion piece, editor Allister Heath claimed that Britain could do nothing to slow climate collapse. With Europe on fire, he urged us to adjust to the ‘mediterranean lifestyle’.
Other national news outlets have lined up to keep telling lies about renewable energy and to howl for more North Sea drilling. The fact that rich media owners often have fossil fuel business interests is (of course) pure coincidence.
The elephant in the room
When not in attack mode, the billionaire media simply ignores the elephant in the room. A recent analysis by the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit found that 72% of 2,500 articles about the June heatwave failed to mention the climate crisis, and fewer than 5% mentioned government efforts to decarbonise.
This toxic nonsense spills out across social media and influences the content of outlets that are meant to be impartial, such as the BBC. With an editorial policy that emphasises ‘balance’, public service broadcasters are forced to represent both sides of a non-existent debate about the seriousness of the climate crisis and the need to tackle it.
“Our campaign shows that people realise they are being asked to doubt their own eyes by the cynical press reporting of the heatwaves,” says campaign organiser Caspar Hughes. “The public has finally had enough.”
Taking Back Control: The Media Sovereignty Act
This is the context in which the grassroots Media Sovereignty Act campaign was born. It demands the introduction of a law that bans foreign/non-dom ownership of media and restricts corporations to owning just one media outlet.
The act also calls for an independent press regulator, demands transparency for funding of ‘think-tanks’ such as the IEA and Policy Exchange who bolster the billionaire media system, and puts a levy on social media companies, such as Meta and X, to fund genuinely independent local journalism.
As Hughes puts it, “To have a free and fair democracy, media ownership must be spread across all sections of society, not just the 0.001%. It is time for us to take back control.”
Anyone wanting to sign the petition needs to do so soon—it closes on 18 September. And, irony of ironies, they’ll need to be a British citizen or UK resident. You couldn’t make it up.
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