Above us only Sky???

A couple of stories over the weekend suggest that the Murdoch empire's efforts to get a stranglehold on the UK's mass media continue unabated. Sky and the newly-minted Virgin Media are having a very public falling-out, and a couple of BBC-bashing books have been sympathetically reviewed in the Times, owned by...well, you know who.

Let's start with Sky-Virgin. (In the interests of full disclosure, I am a Virgin Media subscriber, but also pay extra for the Sky Sports package). Virgin's contract to carry the basic Sky channels is expiring, and Sky is looking for a big fee increase, allegedly as much as 100%. Virgin says it won't pay, so the channels may go dark for Virgin subscribers later this week. Virgin has taken full-page ads in the press to put its side of the story, Sky has retaliated with TV spots reminding Virgin subscribers what they will be missing (mainly Lost, which wouldn't exactly leave a big hole in my life).

It's mighty convenient for Sky to be able to pick a fight with the cable company just as the dead hand of ntl is replaced by the more astute ownership of Richard Branson. And it's clumsy of Virgin to fall into the trap. Reportedly Virgin recently agreed to extend its deal to provide content to Sky at a lower cost. How smart is that? Anyway, if Sky pulls its channels from Virgin, the latter's basic TV package (known as "medium", in the same sense that the smallest coffee at Starbucks is "tall") will contain almost no content that you can't get with a Freeview box. (More disclosure: I've got one of those too!)

This might all just be an enjoyable corporate dingdong, but for the great importance of the media in today's economy. The UK seems more willing than any other developed country to allow control of the sector to fall into private, quasi-monopoly hands. It's dangerous in the extreme to allow one company not only to control a significant and growing segment of the broadcasting system (the satellites) but also to be a major content provider. Sky isn't even a UK company -- Murdoch may have taken on US citizenship, but he certainly wouldn't be able to pull off anything like this in the States, or in Australia, his original homeland.

Sky has repeatedly demonstrated its willingness to use its corporate clout to get what it wants, and now it apparently wants to give Branson a bloody nose. If it gets away with it, what's next? Sky has already defied public opinion and feeble attempts at regulation from Brussels to get effective control of live football broadcasting in the UK, arguably ruining the game in the process. More recently it's done the same with cricket. How long before it decides to turn up the heat further on its competitors by making its sports channels available only to its satellite subscribers?

As for the BBC books, I wouldn't suggest that Murdoch has anything to do with them, but he certainly wouldn't find much in them to quibble with. The basic thesis is that the BBC is misuing public funds and the public trust by pursuing a politically-correct, left-leaning agenda. There's no doubt that the BBC "feels" different from its competitors, but I don't know if this is leftism in any ideological sense. The BBC still seems to take its commitment to quality seriously (obviously I am ignoring Tittybangbang here) and still seems unwilling to accept Margaret Thatcher's appalling view that "there is no such thing as society". To me this makes it the heir to Reith's legacy, rather than Stalin's. In any case, with ITV in disarray, Sky pursuing its own agenda and the daily papers firmly biased to the right, it hardly seems likely that the BBC can be accused of unbalancing the public debate. Someone else has already taken care of that.