Probably an accident waiting to happen

I found this article interesting because I was coming to much the same conclusion myself - for a while. Somehow I couldn't quite see that the profits or readership size of Murdoch's empire (at least the UK part) justified his level of influence in the UK. The statistics in the article are interesting and confirm what I'd learned from other sources.

But thinking further, there is one very good reason why Murdoch's newspapers are a lot more influential than the apparently much larger BBC news output. It appears acceptable for newspapers to conduct political campaigns, without pretending to be balanced, whereas (say) the BBC at least has to pretend to be unbiased.

So I think that makes Murdoch's newpaper business the largest political organ in the UK and this is probably why it has a lot of political influence. That's not by accident of course - Murdoch subsidises key newspapers from the rest of his business precisely because of their political impact.

So in a sense. we have set ourselves up for this by not requiring political neutrality in newspaper publishing and not limiting the size of newspaper groups based on political influence (but only on market share in a business sense). Given that newspapers are the one area where these two "freedoms" co-exist, perhaps it's not surprising that this is where problems have arisen.