George Monbiot has backed the Media Sovereignty Act, and yesterday took it to his own audience.
Posting to his followers, he wrote:
“It’s time to break the grip of the billionaire-owned media on democracy. An independent free press is vital if we’re to urgently confront the climate, nature, poverty and democracy crises.”
He joins Peter Oborne, for many years the chief political commentator of The Telegraph — and that pairing is the point. Two columnists who agree on very little, writing at opposite ends of the British press, have reached the same conclusion about who owns it.
Monbiot has been making this argument for years. Writing in 2019, he set out how the very rich convert money into political outcomes: they fund parties and lobby groups, they set up astroturf campaigns, they pay for social media advertising — but above all, he wrote, they buy newspapers and television stations. The hope had been that social media would break that grip. Instead the platforms filled up with stories the billionaire press had generated in the first place. The grip did not loosen. It found a new distribution system.
That is the argument this campaign was built on, and it is why our Act starts with ownership rather than with content. We are not proposing to tell any newspaper what to print. We are proposing to change who is permitted to own one.
There is already a British answer to what good ownership looks like
It is worth noting where Monbiot writes. The Guardian is not owned by a billionaire. It is owned by the Scott Trust, whose sole purpose is to keep the paper editorially and financially independent in perpetuity — no proprietor, no family, no offshore holding company.
Whatever anyone thinks of the paper itself, the model proves the alternative is not theoretical. Britain already has trust-owned, co-operatively owned and reader-funded journalism. What it lacks is a legal framework that makes that the norm rather than the exception, and a funding stream to build it — which is exactly what the third measure of our Act provides.
The growing list
- Peter Oborne, former chief political commentator, The Telegraph
- George Monbiot, Guardian columnist
- Zack Polanski, leader of the Green Party of England and Wales
- Clive Lewis MP
- Sir Jonathon Porritt, former director of Friends of the Earth
- Professor Bill McGuire, Professor Emeritus of Climate Hazards, UCL
- Sir David King, former Chief Scientific Adviser to the UK government
- Professor Richard Betts, lead author on IPCC reports
- Sir Mark Rylance
Not one of these has been reported by a national newspaper or broadcaster.
Our petition closes at the end of today, Friday 18 September.
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Please sign and share our petition to ban foreign media ownership: https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/760061
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