Compared to the domination of most of the media by ruling-class interests, ownership of the Daily Telegraph is a minor issue, argues Des Freedman

While millions of people in this country are preoccupied by a cost-of-living crisis, the Israeli genocide in Gaza and escalating climate change, the Tories and their friends are more concerned about the identity of the next owners of the Daily Telegraph and the Spectator.

To be fair, if you’re a member of the Conservatives, this is quite an important issue, given that the two titles are widely seen as the house organs of the Tory Party. As the New York Times recently headlined: ‘U.K. Newspaper Deal Seen as a Fight for the Heart of the Tories.’

The titles are up for sale because Lloyds Bank took them back from their previous owners, the Barclay Brothers (billionaire tax exiles who lived on the Channel Island of Brecqhou) due to unpaid debts of more than £1 billion.

Up stepped a company called RedBird IMI who offered to pay off the bank debts if they were given ownership of the titles. RedBird IMI is a joint venture between a US private-equity firm and International Media Investments, a group effectively owned by the Abu Dhabi government.

Cue outrage from the Tory right, warning about foreign ownership and risks to UK national security (and, eventually, a referral by the government to competition authorities). The former BBC broadcaster and current Spectator chair Andrew Neil threatened to resign from his role if the bid was waved through. ‘The idea that these two vital vehicles of mainstream centre-right thought should be owned by Arab money … beggars belief.’ It was of course fine forNeil to take Australian money – i.e. from the pockets of Rupert Murdoch who ran a slew of other ‘vital’ right-wing newspapers, including the Sun and the Times – but Arab money seems to be a step too far.

The Spectator’s editor, Fraser Nelson, was also concerned that it would lead to unacceptable government control of the media. He told the BBC’s Today programme on 22 January that:‘We’ve got a free press tradition in this country and that means keeping governments and publications apart.’

Of course, Nelson is right to worry about government intrusion into the media, but seeing as the former Spectator editor, one Boris Johnson, used to be prime minister, it’s a little late to start worrying. In fact, so deep are the links between the Tories and the Spectator that even Tatler, the magazine of UK high society, condemned what it called the ‘chumocracy’ and the deep web of connections between leading figures of government and the magazine.

Given that the other leading bidders for the titles include the owners of the Daily Mail(DMGT), the former boss of phone-hacking culprit Trinity Mirror, David Montgomery, and one of the leading backers of the hard-right GB News channel, Sir Paul Marshall, it might be wise to think that none of these people are going to fight to protect the independence of the press from government influence.

This isn’t just a problem about individuals but a structural problem of concentrated media power, because the UK media is heavily dominated in each sector by a handful of huge conglomerates. According to the latest report from the Media Reform Coalition (MRC), just three companies (DMGT, Reach and Murdoch’s News UK) dominate 90% of the national newspaper market, while 71% of local titles are owned by six companies. Ten of the top fifteen platforms used to access news in the UK are owned by either Meta, Google or Elon Musk’s X, while just two companies own two-thirds of all the UK’s commercial analogue radio stations.

This means that a tiny number of companies who are either accountable only to shareholders or answerable to the Tory values of their mogul owners (or both) control the flow of news and opinion in this country. The MRC rightly concludes that these levels of concentration:

‘demonstrate that we need action to challenge corporate media juggernauts and global tech giants, and to break down the political and market influence that flows from their dominance of central parts of the media landscape.’

But undue political influence is felt just as keenly in public-service broadcasting as it is with for-profit commercial media.

You only have to look at the key movers at the top of the BBC to see this. Its previous chair, Richard Sharp, was an investment banker, former colleague of Rishi Sunak, and a donor to the Conservatives. He resigned after he was found to have been involved in ‘facilitating’ an £800,000 loan for Boris Johnson. The director general, Tim Davie, a former marketing executive and former deputy chair of Hammersmith Conservatives, remains in post.

Meanwhile Robbie Gibb, the director of communications for former Tory prime minister Theresa May is now one of the most influential members of the BBC Board. In a talk to the TaxPayers’ Alliance in March 2020, Gibb described himself as ‘a long-standing Conservative. I’m not a Chris Patten apologist-type Conservative. I’m a proper Thatcherite Conservative.’ His partisanship is so extreme that the former Newsnight presenter Emily Maitlis, in her 2022 MacTaggart Lecture, referred to him as an ‘an active agent of the Conservative party’, who is shaping the broadcaster’s news output by acting ‘as the arbiter of BBC impartiality’.

Gibb was nominated by the government to his position (most other Board members are appointed by the BBC itself) and, according to former Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger, is ‘the key voice on the most critical BBC Board Committee – which will rule on any issues to do with Israel-Gaza.’ What is particularly interesting about this is that Gibb is also the owner of the Jewish Chronicle – a fierce supporter of Israel’s military actions in Gaza and an outlet that has regularly breached press standards.

Despite the public repeatedly being told that the BBC adheres to ‘due impartiality’ on all major political issues, Alan Rusbridger claims he has been told by BBC journalists that Gibb, although not being a journalist himself, ‘has intervened at story level. Senior execs told me he’s seen as key to the BBC getting funding.’

This level of political interference might help to explain why the BBC, along with much of the Western media, has ‘failed’ the people of Gaza, and why Palestinian perspectives are ‘given far less time and legitimacy’ than Israeli ones.

The British media desperately needs thoroughgoing change – it is now amongst the least trusted in the world, it is criminally negligent, as the ongoing revelations of extensive phone hacking reveal, and far too intimate with the politicians and the powerful, as demonstrated by the guest list of the annual party hosted by the Murdochs.

One of the attendees at last year’s party was the Labour leader Keir Starmer, so it was hardly a surprise to learn that Labour will not be calling for press reform ahead of a forthcoming election, in which they will be courting, not contesting, billionaire media moguls and top editors.

We have a media system utterly committed to reproducing the ideas and values of the most powerful in society. The media may not tell us exactly what to think but, as the political scientist Bernard Cohen once put it, ‘they tell us what to think about’. Karl Marx put it even more bluntly in The German Ideology that ‘The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas: i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society is at the same time its ruling intellectual force.’

Reflecting on the sale of the Spectator, its editor, Fraser Nelson, was entirely right to arguethat ‘media ownership affects all of us. Readers will want to know what strings are attached to the radio stations, newspapers and magazines they read and listen to.’ Those strings – the ones that link influential mainstream-media outlets to the political and economic interests that control British society – desperately need unravelling if we’re ever to have a media that is genuinely free.