Most people do not realise that the proposed purchase of ITV’s broadcasting and streaming business by Comcast-owned Sky would also hand a stake in ITN to offshore media billionaires.
Most people also do not realise that ITN supplies the news not only to ITV, but to our publicly owned broadcaster Channel 4 — and to Channel 5.
How the ownership works
ITN is a separate company from ITV. It is currently owned by ITV (40%), Informa (20%), Jonathan Harmsworth’s Daily Mail group (20%) and the Thomson family, owners of Thomson Reuters (20%). The Thomsons are the richest billionaires in Canada.
Under the agreed Sky deal, ITV’s 40% stake in ITN is to be split, leaving Comcast’s Sky with an indirect 20% shareholding.
Do that arithmetic. Sky’s 20%, plus Harmsworth’s 20%, plus the Thomson family’s 20%, gives foreign-based billionaire interests a combined 60% of the company that makes the news for three of our four main commercial and public broadcasters.
What would be left
Channel 5 is already owned by Paramount, run by David Ellison, whose family fortune comes from the US tech billionaire Larry Ellison. Sky News is already owned by Comcast, controlled by the US billionaire Brian Roberts.
Add ITN to that list and the billionaire class would choke off almost every national news operation in Britain that is not in their fists, other than the BBC.
And the BBC is hugely influenced by the flood of billionaire-controlled news it is now surrounded by.
- Sky News — US billionaire-controlled
- Channel 5 News — US billionaire-controlled
- ITN — US, Canadian and Bermudan billionaire interests
- Channel 4 News — supplied by ITN
- Reuters — Canadian billionaire family
This one is still winnable
This is not a done deal. The takeover has to clear the Competition and Markets Authority and Ofcom, and the final decision sits with the Culture Secretary, Lisa Nandy.
For the UK to defend the last vestiges of its broadcasting sovereignty, the Burnham government must not wave this through. And it must adopt the Media Sovereignty Act, which bans foreign ownership of UK national news media.
Our YouGov poll showed a large majority of the British public opposes foreign ownership of our news corporations — 63% in favour of a ban, with only 15% against.
As long as the billionaires own our news, we do not have a free and fair democracy. We have a billionairist oligarchy.
Our petition closes on Friday 18 September.
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Please sign and share our petition to ban foreign media ownership: https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/760061
And help us cover Campaign costs by donating to our Crowdfunder: https://www.crowdfunder.co.uk/p/crowdfunder-for-polling-the-publics-view-on-billi