United Kingdom – (E1) Media ownership concentration national level

At first sight, the UK has a highly competitive broadcasting market. The extensive penetration of multi-channel television means that a large number of news providers are available, including foreign services like CNN, Fox News, Euronews, France 24 and Russia Today. However, news viewing is concentrated. The House of Lords Select Committee on communications (2008a: 23) noted that:

‘While the choice of news programmes has increased, BBC1 and ITV1 still attract the largest audience shares for news programmes. An analysis of TV news viewing in October 2006 showed that BBC1 had a 50.6 % share, ITV1 had a 26.8 % share, Channel 4 had a 4.5 % share, Five a 2.8 % share and BBC2 a 4.6 % share. BBC News 24 had a 5.2 % chare and Sky News a 4.9 % share.’

Only three UK companies actually produce TV news: the BBC, ITN (which provides ITV and Channel 4) and Sky (which provides its own channel and Five). Regional television news is produced by the BBC and by the Channel 3 licence holders. ITV plc currently owns 11 of the 15 Channel 3 regional licences that compose the ITV network. ITN is 40 % owned by ITV plc, 20 % by Thomson Reuters, 20 % by United Business Media, and 20 % by the major UK press company Daily Mail and General Trust.¹⁰ National radio news is produced by three companies. The BBC produces bulletins for its own channels, and Independent Radio News and Sky News Radio supply the commercial radio sector. ITN has a 20 % share of Independent Radio News. Sky News and Sky News Radio are part of the Murdoch-controlled BSkyB operation.

London plays host to the largest and most competitive national press in Europe. London-based UK national newspapers, rather than local papers, are the main source of national and international news (though the Scottish newspapers also serve this function). The UK national press market is generally characterized as being composed of three categories of newspapers. ‘Quality papers’, with an ‘upmarket’ educated middle class readership (just under a quarter of total readership), are the Guardian, the Independent, the Daily Telegraph, and the Times, together with their Sunday editions (the Observer, in the Guardian’s case) and also the Financial Times. A much larger readership is shared between the ‘midmarket’ Daily Mail and Daily Express and their Sunday editions, catering to a mainly white collar middle class readership (just over a quarter of total readership). The ‘downmarket’ or ‘popular’ papers – notably the Sun, the News of the World, the People, the Mirror and the Star and their Sunday editions – appeal to the remaining largely lower middle and working class readership (they account for about half of the total readership). Although highly competitive, with a range of titles that allows for considerable diversity of style and a partisan range of political and social orientations (the external pluralism noted by Hallin and Mancini as being exceptional for the North Atlantic/Liberal model), ownership of the UK national press is highly concentrated (by the CR3 measure, C = 73).¹¹

Table 1. National Newspaper Ownership in 2010

Source: Data from Keynote 2010.

The principal instance of diagonal ownership concentration in the UK is that of News International, the UK subsidiary of the global media corporation News Corporation (in which Rupert Murdoch’s family is the controlling shareholder). As seen, News International owns a number of UK national newspapers, with a combined readership market share of 35 % in 2010. News International also controls (through a 37 % share which it is seeking official approval to extend to 100 %) the UK’s most important pay-TV platform, BSkyB. BSkyB also had a 17.9 % share in ITV plc, though it has been compelled on competition grounds to reduce this to 7.5 %.