I own a few Sky shares so I wasn’t exactly thrilled when James Murdoch decided to buy a chunk of ITV. Still, the following announcement had me choking on my chips:

Ofcom’s advice is that there are public interest issues, in relation to sufficient plurality of news provision for both cross media and television news in the UK.

Wow. “Sufficient plurality of news provision.” The guys at Ofcom never worried about poverty of news provision when news budgets were slashed at ITV and Five. But now they’re worried about plurality.

The bottom line is a single independent news organization might just have the cash to compete toe-to-toe with the BBC.

Ofcom meanwhile might need reminding that digital TV viewers can get CNN International, Al Jazeera English, Bloomberg, France 24, Deutsche-Welle TV, Euronews and a host of other news services should they so desire. There might be good reasons to stop this deal, but Ofcom’s advice? That ain’t one of them.